


anthân lu sharagên

by nsmorig



Category: The Lord of the Rings - All Media Types, The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Aglarond, Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Dwarf Culture & Customs, Elf Culture & Customs, Ensemble Cast, Eventual Happy Ending, Fairy Tale Elements, Friends to Lovers, Gratuitious Descriptions of Regional Cuisine, I Am The Angst Gremlin; Everything I Touch Withers And Dies, Ithilien, Legolas Makes Trouble And Bad Choices, M/M, Made-Up Dwarf OCs (That I Would Die For), Meddling, Miscommunication, Mutual Pining, Nonbinary Dwarves, Not Actually Unrequited Love, Politics, Post-Canon, Practically Glacial Burn, Slow Burn, Time Travel, Time Travel Fix-It, Tongue-In-Cheek Pretentiousness
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-12
Updated: 2019-05-08
Packaged: 2019-05-21 09:29:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 16
Words: 33,336
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14912811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nsmorig/pseuds/nsmorig
Summary: A story about time travel, politics, axes, the baking of pastries, the value of good friends, messy mortal love, and getting things right the second time around.





	1. the cycle of the seasons

**Author's Note:**

> whats up folks im back on my bullshit
> 
> warning for major character death is temporary and by temporary i mean really do not worry about it

Legolas dies alone.

 

The blood falls from his mouth and settles in leaves and branches, spilling from where his insides bleed, from where the scum of the poison coats his lungs. He looks up-- through the pale red leaves towards the white, white sky-- and watches from somewhere distant as the wide world falls away.

 

There was no justice in it, he thinks abstractly. No honour. Were this a ballad he should throw his song-book at the wall and make grief with the writer for such an unsatisfying ending.

 

It is not a ballad.

 

//

  


Gimli does not cry. He does not sob and wail and scream. He wishes to but he does not.

 

He does not humiliate himself thus.

 

The people of Ilithien turn the body into his care and Legolas is cold to the touch. His eyes and mouth are crusted with blood, his dark skin greying with the icy pallor of death, and Gimi looks to the leaves just turning with the seasons and knows what to do.

 

There is a river through the centre of the kingdom. He takes the boat-- the great, fine boat they built together-- and lays Legolas out in it, fills it with the turning leaves and quick-catching wood of this too-hot city. He covers him, because Legolas would wish to be buried thus, and also Gimli cannot stand to look at him as he does this.

 

The early morning fog rises from the mirror-dark water, silvery and sweet.

 

It is presumption, to subject Legolas to his crude Dwarven funerary skills. The people of Ilithien would have stopped him, had they been able; they would have laid him out in state and held week-long funerals, and Gimli could not have borne it.

 

So he does not.

 

He steps into the boat, pushes away from the shore, drops the oars. Lights a match.

 

The fire burns bright and hot, sparkling on the water, sending plumes of dark smoke up to high heaven, and still Gimli is cold and numb. Distant singing comes low and sweet from the shores, rises on the wind with the smoke, and on they sail.

 

Someone seems to stand beside him as the boat burns. A hand rests on his shoulder, warm and ghost-light. He doesn’t turn.

  


//

  


He wakes choking on soot and tar. The thick air stinks of burning as he gasps in desperate breaths, and as his eyes strain in the gloom there is a brief, shining light.

 

A leaf-- a deep brown sliver of willow-leaf-- shines with the gold of embers, flares once into a fire and winks out. The ashes drift down, faintly glowing, before the dark once again fills the room. He thinks, for a moment, that he hears a flute, high and clear and almost silent,  play the long last note of a mourning-song.

 

There is no light here other than what spills from his burning hands, and oh, they burn. The edges of the fires spill across his skin, flesh charring, the smell of meat and sulfur for a moment drowning him and then--

 

And then--

 

There is no more fire. There is no pain, there is no sulfur, there is no smoke. There is only the dark and his frantic breathing.

 

Are these the halls of his ancestors? Is he to spend eternity here, in the dark, to never see his home again, to know his friend and closest companion is parted from him until time draws to a close and eternity finishes?

 

He shakes. He draws his limbs close, clasps his numb hands about his body, and thinks of the open sky.

  


//

  


Legolas slides from death to flight between moments. He hangs suspended in the air and in reflex-quick whispers of memory brings his hands down, catching on the oak-branch and throwing himself up again.

 

He blinks blood out of his eyes.

 

The night is warm and the summer trees, filmed red with iron, blush green with all the Earth has given them. He remembers this, remembers this patrol route, remembers the camouflaged figure ahead of him and the near-silent footsteps of his old squad behind.

 

How kind, of this poison, to give him a dreaming-reverie, a sleeping-memory, before he dies. And what a memory it is! The leaves are crisp, the moon pale and clear, the sounds behind him fluid as they never are in sleep. He feels as if he could run off the path and the dream would stay as true. It feels like true-dreaming, like prophecy, not like the past.

 

He misses his hand-hold. The forest falls past him, dizzying black and grey and green; he would be embarrassed were this preserved Greenwood real and if he did not immediately double over into hacking, gasping coughs. Dark blood spatters gruesomely on the soil; he has to grasp at a tree trunk to keep from collapsing.

 

“Coward,” he spits into the air, hoping he who poisoned him is nearby as he lies in slumber. He tries to marshall his thoughts for a curse, but Tauriel’s feet land softly on the earth. Sick and dying, he smiles at the false-image of her, broad and manic, lets the blood bubble up between his teeth.

 

“Peace, my prince,” she says, and then more frantically, “Legolas, what is wrong, what happened--”

 

Still she butchers the diphthong! She stretches the _laeg,_ as though he had not dropped the long vowel for her Silvan convenience. Perhaps this dream is before the Greenwood was the Mirkwood, perhaps this is his very first patrol for spiders. What an odd prospect.

 

He refuses to waste what little time he has yet among the living; the grasps at the edges of Tauriel’s hood, brings her red head forward and kisses once, gently, at her forehead. He leaves a bloody image of his lips, and is sorry for it.

 

“Fret not,” he says. “I am dying, is all, there is naught to fear for me. Go back into the dream-wild, tell all who rest there that it will all be alright, soon I will be flattering-false and insubstantial as you.”

 

He watches her face, yet the same and yet young, crease from lack of understanding, and releases her. Once again he blinks back the film of blood across his vision. And then he sets his feet and jumps, grasps firmly at handholds that he knows like the calluses of his own fingers. He flees.

 

He has seen what once was. He has seen it, and now he wishes to wake up. He runs from his memory, leaps from familiar tree to familiar tree until he is far away from his patrol route. His father’s kingdom can exert little law this deep, this dark into the forest, and he leaps and flies and runs until even a scream would not reach the ears of his comrades.

 

He is not followed. There are things that he has learnt that can make sure of that.

 

The moon is distant now, a grey light in the far-away sky, and she does not grace the ground. This, here, he does not remember, these trees, this unfamiliar wilderness. His flesh is cold and numb, his limbs clumsy, and he does not know if it is the poison or the creeping terror.

 

He cannot be dreaming this. His mind swims, his vision blurs, he kneels to the the ground and retches, and then--

 

And then he is fine. His mouth is metallic and the clearing stinks of bile but he can breathe again; finally, finally, his mind is clear.

 

The manic ebbs away slowly.

 

A miracle, he thinks. A miracle or some other unexplainable impossible unreal thing.

 

He does not _remember_ this. He is not dreaming. He was poisoned, dying, murdered, watched the sky go dark, and now--

 

Now he leans against the trees of his own kingdom, his first home, and sinks his fingers into moss to hold himself upright. Dew settles on his skin, and his drying blood and sweat is cold and _real._

 

He thinks of a bloody imprint on Tauriel’s forehead, how she spoke to him as a stranger. He thinks. He remembers. He shakes. He tries to breathe.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> those of u who have read my other bullshit on here will know that i have Very Specific Tastes: i like resurrection, time travel, weird fantasy shit, overblown symbolism and angst. 
> 
> this was inevitable.
> 
> now, i am going to reread it, but i read lotr once two years ago, and i think i skipped the first book. somehow i know things, but this idea jumped me in a dark alley in Oxford and i couldn't escape it. please, please point out stupid inaccuracies, and be forgiving where you can.
> 
> furthermore: white, blond legolas is boring, and the only textual evidence for it is that his father is blond.


	2. archaeology in ered luin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Camli’s eldest son worries her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tolkien: dwarven women make up a small minority and dwarves are monogamous  
> me, four foot eight and carrying an axe, an expert on dwarves: gimli has two mums and a dad and they all love him very much

Camli’s eldest son worries her.

 

All her children worry her, but Gimli most of all. 

 

Where her younger children worry her with recklessness, Camlín with her endless falling-in-love and Gonli with their war-mongering and criminal friends, Gimli is too honourable. He is reckless, yes, stubborn and impulsive, but he cannot help inheriting her faults. No, Gimli takes too much after his father, devotes too much of himself to the kingdom, spends too long at the training fields. He thinks too hard for one so young. A  hot chisel will not rust, she thinks, but blunts too quickly.

 

This is why it is odd when the street-lanterns are lit and even Gon’ is out of bed and Gimli is still shut up in his room. Any other day, and she would have to brawl with him so he would sit and eat his breakfast, instead of rushing out of the door with his boots untied and a lump of bread to eat as though she and Gloin were Mannish parents that make their children fend for themselves.

 

The light isn’t even on, nothing glowing under the door, so she wonders vaguely if he has slipped out before anyone else was awake-- but no, she puts her ear to the door and hears his breathing. It is fast and laboured, but just muffled enough that she thinks-- she thinks he is hiding. He is hiding this distress from her.

 

Well. 

 

Doesn’t that feel like a punch to the gut.

 

She tries to walk away-- it is a terrible thing, to leave a child with no privacy-- but he is gasping little hitching gasps and she cannot bring herself to do it.

 

“Gimli?” she murmurs, and then a little louder, “Inudoyê?”

 

The sound stops. Her ears are keen from hunting-- he holds his breath like a frightened rabbit.

 

A hushed, stammering “...Amad?” issues from his room, a crack in the middle as though he’s shocked at the sound of his own voice.

 

“Can I come in, lad? Gimelul?” she says, at an even tone and volume, as though speaking to a deer in a bear-trap.

 

There is a moment, and another, and she hears her heartbeat in her ears.

  
  


_ “Amadel,”  _ he says, and it sounds like he is crying, rushed out and desperate. Her hand is on the handle before he can gasp the last syllable. 

 

Her son sits, curled in a tight ball, on his stripped bed, sheets discarded across the room as though he has been thrashing with his whole body. He brings his hand to cover his eyes at the light. All of the breath she has ever breathed is knocked out of her, all at once, at the sight of his  _ hands, _ his forearms, his bare feet, pale and marred by scar tissue-- burns work their way up his hands, fully healed, as though he had stood in Erebor as it burned and plunged his hands into the fire.

 

She blinks, and his hands are just hands.

 

“Darling, what’s wrong, what happened--” and he has flung himself at her, curled tight into her shoulder.

 

He murmurs into her skin, frantic whispers that she can’t quite make out, something that might be a prayer. She lifts him as though he were much smaller, leads them back and sits down, lets him cling tighter, smooths a hand across his skull.

 

They stay for a hundred long moments, Camli letting his fear and grief drain slowly out. She wracks her formidable brain for what could have caused this and finds nothing.

 

Her line have always been true-dreamers, portent-readers, sharp of mind. Her cousin Thorin, dull as a brick though he be as far as she is concerned, has always seen opportunity where it hides; Camlín’s gift is so strong she is considering the priesthood. And Camli knows things, sometimes, without quite knowing why. She thinks of the burns that she saw, of the murmurs her husband carefully does not mention, and she knows what happened.

 

“Gimli,” she says, “Inudoyê, Gimelul, did you dream of fire?”

 

He clings tighter, and very quietly says “Aye.”

 

She holds tighter, and presses a kiss to the crown of his head where the skin is bruised from ill-fitting practice helmets. 

 

Camlin drifts past the door in an almost elven-looking shift, and Camli forgoes yelling at her about spending their hard-earned money on fripperies in favour of signing frantically at her behind Gimli’s back:  _ emergency, search out mother, adad, bring them here, _ and then once again, fingers stabbing,  _ emergency. _

 

Gimli’s catching gasps slow down, and she carts light fingers through his hair. He sits up, unscrews his body like a clamp, and smiles a terrible, watery smile. It is worse than she thought.

 

“Aye,” he says again. His voice is almost clear now. “Aye, I dreamt of fire, but not, I think, in the way you thought.”

 

He looks up at the ceiling, breathes, and starts to extricate himself. He sits, cross-legged like a child in school, and looks far too old. Gloin comes running down the hall in a clatter of armour, Imin following behind him in a similar panic, and as they fill the doorway Gimli once again goes almost white with some sort of non-recognition, some strange surprise.

 

She sees the exact same desperation to help, the shutdown of thoughts that are not  _ my child is in distress,  _ on Gloin and Imin’s faces that was so recently on hers, and spares a second to think  _ I married well _ before the bed is creaking under the weight of four dwarves.

 

There is a moment of confusion as Gloin and Imin bounce between smothering him in love and giving him the space to breathe, but eventually the lot of the find a balance and Gimli in clinging to his father as he had been clinging to her. Camli laces her fingers into Imin’s delicate ones, and they rest on Gimli’s knee, trying to be a comfort without being a terror.

 

“Ai, ammad, adad, no need for that, I will not fly apart if not cuddled,” he says, and Camli spares a moment to wonder at the ‘ai,’ stretched like a complaint, odd and foreign; where did they he learn that?

 

Gimli’s face firms once again, and his gaze jumps between the three of them. He swallows. “This is Ered Luin, aye? Course it must be. So indulge me, if y’would; what is the date? The year?”

 

Imin gives the date, in the confused reckoning of men, and the year as 2932, adding ‘of the third age’ in a sort of baffled sarcasm that grows steadily more baffled as Gimli pitches forwards, laughing lowly.

 

“Elves dream by memory; an elfish dream, to the dreamer, is as real as the present, a flawless reproduction of the past. This, then-- this is a dream or a nightmare, and I’d thank you all to wait for me to decide which.”

 

Gloin hooks a finger under Gimli’s chin, pulls his face towards him, and pitches his voice low. “What are you going on about, my lad?” he says, and Camlin has to agree with the sentiment.

 

He purses his lips, says nothing, and then smiles oddly. “Ignore me,” he says, “I speak of nothing,” and Camlin only has to look at her husband and her wife to know that that is not happening.

 

“Gimelul...” Imin says, and trails off. “Have you been having odd dreams recently? Sometimes, if the true-dreaming sneaks up on someone...”

 

She can  _ see _ Gloin’s thoughts turn to Imin’s brother, who had thrown himself on his own forge-fire a month before the Calmity reached Erebor. And then, for a moment, she could see Gimli think of the same thing, just from the way his brow creased.

 

They’d never told him. Mahal fucking  _ weeps. _ They’d never told him. It is prophecy.

 

Dreams of fire.


	3. truth, and variations thereupon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> more dwarf ocs are introduced and lovingly cherished by me. gimli lies like a lying thing

As much as they may deny it, and in fact the truth of the matter is likely entirely forgotten to the modern dwarves-- the caverns and mines at Ered Luin were built with a distinctively Elven sensibility. Those mountains border on the Grey Havens, and when the world was young and the enmity was cooler and not quite so biting the Elves played a part in building the vaulted halls and sunlit terraces of the city-- and they were directly responsible for a delicate system of mirrors and pulleys and windows that directed the sunlight down into halls so wide they may as well have been fields, letting broad green oaks and sprawling, blooming vines grow under the earth.

 

It is a common misconception that Dwarves do not eat vegetables. Dwarves are perfectly willing to eat anything when the alternative is nothing at all. The Dwarves of Ered Luin took full advantage of their sunlit caves, and had been starving for so long that they had developed the concept of crop rotation.

 

Ered Luin, then, had put all her grand chambers and stepped terraces to the task of feeding her people, and actual living was confined to a growing network of warren-like caves built wherever they would fit. It was in one of these that Gimli’s parents, worn and weary from their journey, had tried to make a home after the Dragon; it was one of these windowless rooms that Gimli had grown up in, and it was this same salvaged space that Gimli sits now and makes his coffee.

 

The hearth, low and red, glistens in the water, splinters and fragments off the brass of the press.

 

He thinks. He cannot help it.

 

He has forgotten how his mother took it. Takes.

 

She sits across the table, back on the red stone, and watches him coolly. Her eyes, dark and shining as the coffee, linger on his hands as they shake, ever-so-slightly, as he holds the milk-jug above her cup. She looks at him like a stranger, and as he sets the jug down he feels like one.

 

“I’m sorry--” he says, a gasp pushed down, and as another apology squirms in his throat she claps her hands to her mouth and her eyes go wide with something that he can’t identify.

 

“It’s true,” she says. “It’s actually true.”

 

He swallows, lifts the tray and walks to the table. “I do not think it is true-dreaming,” he says. “It feels true, and like a dream, and yet . . .”

 

He is not sure what truths he is avoiding. He knows, however, that he cannot yet explain, not even to his parents. To tell the tale of his life is to tell the tale of Arda, and what does he know? It may yet be some strange nightmare. He may yet still be in the Halls, dreaming his afterlife away.

 

He is not sure what to tell and what to conceal, whether he has torn apart the fabric from which the onward motion of time is woven.

 

“It takes everyone differently,” his ammad says. “My brother-- your uncle . . .”

 

“I know. You’ve told me.”

 

“No,” she says, swallows. “No, I haven’t.”

 

"'Ibinê . . . "

 

She trails off, turns her cup in her hands and seeks to hide behind the steam.

 

"What did you see?"

 

He could weave a tale the like of which she's never heard before, a cast of characters without match, elves and orcs and hobbits and Barrow-Wights and Maia. It scrolls out in his head, the story of his life, how his father threw himself upon the Dragon and he in turn set out from Erebor. He thinks of battles, of friends, of Rings and silmarils and Algarond and pale grey boats.

 

He could tell that story, and it would be wonderful, and she would think him taken on a flight of fancy or that he had rammed his skull into the stone until it was addled.

 

She looks at him still as though he has suffered some great tragedy. He summons his diplomat's smile, and she flinches.

 

He takes a cue from her, and takes a long draught from his cup to disguise how he cannot marshall a single word of sense. The coffee is strong and dark and exactly the kind that he drank like air when he was younger, but now he cannot help but taste the acrid undertones, the acid. He'd never realised quite how bad this coffee was until they'd been able to afford the kind that tasted like liquid gold.

 

"I saw--"

 

He cannot lie to his mother. He cannot do it; it stings somewhere in his chest. He cannot tell her the truth, either.

 

"Erebor."

 

It is not a lie. He tells himself that, as she sits up straight and looks at him with wonder in her dark eyes. He feels like a fairground magician, promising miracles.

 

"I saw the dragon, slain. I dreamt a great war, and a great loss." He swallows, and drinks his cheap coffee. "I saw a new age.”

 

His mother rests a hand on his shoulder, smile watery and real. "How can this be?" she murmurs.

 

"Ammad . . ."

 

He deliberately misunderstands the question, searches out a way to turn her attention from him. It feels as though any second he will fold, and she will see through to the confusion still coiling in his stomach like a snake.

 

"Have you talked to father?" He says, thinking of the weeks when she and Amad had left his father to fend for himself after he had been discovered to have been lying to them. Outrage, perhaps, will deflect that acid-soft gaze. "There is something he is planning in secret, with the-- the Prince."

 

As he had hoped, her face closes, her shoulders drawing back. "I see," She says, and he does not envy his father.

 

She leans in again, and sets a kiss against his forehead. He remembers returning her to the Stone, and thinks that he might crumble into pieces.

 

Camlin comes almost silently down the hall, and Gimli can't help a ridiculous beam at how she's still shorter than him, the roundness of her cheeks and the barely-there fluff of her beard. She sidles into the kitchen with such faux-lightness that Gimli knows she must be late, and she is shocked when he hands her a mug of coffee instead of making her steal one.

 

She stares at him with eyes narrowed, and Gimli merely smiles. There is something wonderfully satisfying about her suspicion, the nostalgic shape of it.

 

"Ammad," she says abruptly, "If Gimli's training is cancelled, or if he is skipping class to smile like a snake at me and sit around with his boots off, can I not stay home from lectures in similar idleness?"

 

He swallows a laugh at the superiority in her tone, before a foreboding coils down his spine. He may still be in some strange dream, but he has never in his life been late to training, and his honour has certain demands even if he is only debatably real.

 

He takes to his heels and draws his childhood axes from the rack, weighs the time it would take to lace up his boots against Dwalin's scowl and decides to face today like a Hobbit. He's halfway out the door before the centuries-old elder-brother instinct drives him back, and he is able to drop a single kiss on Camlin's forehead before she can react. "Go to your lectures," he says, "You start anthropomorphic personifications soon, and you'll like those."

 

Camlin's forehead creases into a fantastically furious little V, and he grins as he sprints away on his bare feet into the warren of the city.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ibinê - 'my gem'
> 
> a clarification:
> 
> 'amad' is Camli, a silversmith, the mother from whom Gimli gets his red hair, not-inconsiderable strength, and academic interests. 'ammad' is Imin, a diplomat, from whom Gimli gets his talent at talking for a very long time without saying anything of meaning, and, notably, ability to notice a halftruth. they have a cat. it's all very domestic.


	4. the woods are lovely, dark and deep

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> legolas continues to be A Bit Manic; more ocs have speaking parts. @tolkien more Background Pals, please. leggy deserves some friends

The bark is chill and wonderfully solid where he leans against it; the susurrus sound of the wind in the pines, a sound so purely 'home' he had not at first noticed it, is far too real for him to have invented.

 

This cannot be real. He has applied the best of his logic to the task of proving so.

 

This cannot be real and yet, despite the force of his reasoning, it stubbornly is.

 

He takes a deep breath and feels the chill evening air, gloriously and inexplicably more cold than a dream could ever be. The stars, moving slowly in their circles, shine like sparks struck upon the sky. He recalls a dwarvish story-- the forge of Aulë, or something, and that the first stars were glowing embers . . .

 

Is this a night for myth? He cannot quite be sure.

 

His ears twitch, and then there they are; there is the sound of undergrowth under boot, distant but unmistakable. Ororin, still as heavy-footed as an Oliphant but just as wise. He passes right under the tree in which Legolas is lying, and predictably soon there are the steps of Tauriel and Pereli and-- though he has to strain for it-- the murmur of Nadezihia's breathing.

 

There is the impulse to chide them for their collective lack of grace, but, he reasons, this impossible dream is probably before any of them had learned; he himself had stomped abominably.

 

He does not move. He wants to run, again, to sprint and fall and tear the skin off his hands and wake himself up, but there is a sort of inertia to him, and he fears he will never move again, will sit here dreaming with his back to a pine for the remainder of the lifetime of Arda.

 

His plan to remain undisturbed is foiled, inevitably, by Ororin and his damned habit of noticing things. He comes rising from the underbrush, heralded by the sounds of snapping twigs and murmured profanity, until he's resting, breathing hard, just below Legolas.

 

" . . . Hello," Legolas says absently, peering down at him in what he thinks is a fairly good impression of Gandalf trying not to be questioned.

 

Ororin's hair is still short, still drifting around his worried head in a pale dandelion clock that Legolas remembers he will shortly grow out of. His left hand, clasped tight to a branch, is not yet scarred and darkened by a streak of spider venom. A small part of Legolas that is yet lucid wonders if it would be possible to keep it that way.

 

"Do not fear for me," Legolas announces before Ororin can speak, drawling out the sentences in his unnatural calm. "I was seized by a sudden malady of the brain, and saw visions, and now I am as right and well as cold spring rain."

 

He is only half trying to reassure him-- he is aware that nothing can make a healer relax once they have set themselves to fretting-- and is half speaking to himself, in the hope that he does not lie.

 

"My prince," says Ororin, and again they go with the formalities!-- "You are bleeding!"

 

"Ai! I was." He cannot help but laugh, "And now I am not. Is this not the best order of things? Good doctor, is this not ideal?"

 

Ororin merely looks at him, guileless, fearful. His eyes are huge in the low light, and steady, and Legolas cannot hold his gaze, as hard as he tries.

 

"I worry for you," Ororin says. "Will you not come down to the earth and let me see how you are ill?"

 

Legolas swallows. "Aye," he says, and has to cough, because suddenly his throat is full of something. He realises that he has not seen Ororin since . . . oh, since he left for Rivendell. He realises, like gravity dropping out, that he isn't sure that he lived. "Aye, I will come, if you will it."

 

He turns away, suddenly cannot face the sight of him. His unit waits around the base of the pine tree, faces upturned like flowers. The stiffness leaves his limbs all at once, and he steps onto the sky, plummets with all the grace he can muster.

 

He lands almost silently facing Nadezihia, and a laugh entirely opposed to whatever cold has stopped up his chest bubbles out of him as she gasps and grabs at his arms.

 

"I warn you," he says, and is pleased to note that the faux-lightness is back in his voice, "You spend your time unwisely. I am hale as anything yet."

 

"I suppose you believe that you can lie to me," Tauriel says, grim with worry, and he is not sure what his great untruth is supposed to be.

 

He searches for some way to explain this, and as he stares away from those that he would like to trust his eye catches on a silvery glint where no glint should be. It strikes him, then, quite how far from the paths he has run. The sky is too dark, the canopy too close, crowding the way leaves shouldn't. No birds call. Nothing moves here.

 

He reaches for his knife, and a smile passes over his face as he draws it through the air and finds pale threads clinging to the flat of the blade.

 

"As I am told the Periannath have it," he whispers, "Fear, fire, foes, awake. My friends, I am aggrieved to announce that we are not alone."

 

//

 

Legolas turns away from them, and it is only respect for his King that stops Ororin from demanding he explain himself. As it is, he watches with a concerned eye as Tauriel signs something he fails to catch and then falls into what he recognises as a combat stance.

 

They move slowly forward through the trees, and Ororin watches the way that Legolas' hands shake, how he is cadaver-grey. He sees, in the corner of his eye, drying blood on his tunic. The physician in him wants to stop him where he stands and bundle him home. The part of him that has spent the past year in training for these patrols says that, right now, not even his Prince is more important than protecting the forest.

 

The Captain had requested specifically that they take someone with knowledge of venoms and poisons. Ahead he hears the quiet scraping of what he hopes with his entire Fëa is not an insect exoskeleton, and begins to understand why.

 

Legolas holds up a hand, and moves it quick and blurred into foreign shapes. He turns to Nadezihia, who looks back at him with the same blank bafflement as he feels, but Tauriel veers off to the left without question, and when she turns and scowls at them they make a clumsy sort of three-pronged formation.

 

Ororin clutches his staff tight and hopes like hell he's far back enough not to need it. He wishes he wasn't so aware of the way that Legolas moves as though he's used to wearing armour. He wishes that the glinting in the canopy were not quite so much like shining eyes.

 

//

 

Her fingers sting as the fight comes to a close, but miracle of miracles, none of her people are injured; the healer is clinging to his staff and vaguely hyperventilating, but they found victory swiftly and easily. Leaves shiver as Legolas jumps onto the split carapace of one of the beasts and calls out in common: "Six!"

 

Tauriel watches as he pauses, and turns his head like an owl, and his battle-manic smile drains away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> motherfucking asshole spiders. hate them


	5. space, in four dimensions

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the weight of time in the body; mysterious strangers and mysterious friends.

His old axes are too light. He hadn't realised when he'd grabbed them, but they are; he keeps over-correcting for inertia, and his movements are jerky and too slow. The grip is wrong, too.

 

Maybe his hands are wrong. The calluses on his palms are thin and almost smooth; he's having to grip too tight.

 

Everything is just a little bit wrong, and as he returns his feet to resting position and falls back into the first defensive stance for the ninth time he can feel the irritation simmer.

 

It doesn't help that he can't look at half the room for fear of catching Kili's eyes again.

 

He moves forward into a double sweep, and _there it is._ He's leaned too far forwards without realising; his centre of gravity is wrong, and he's unbalanced.

 

"Shit," he murmurs, because that'll take longer to fix than axe-grips.

 

He steps out of his stance, stretches out his arms for a moment and bounces on the balls of his feet. There's no fluidity to it. He feels as though he's lost something fundamental.

 

Dwalin comes towards him over the training mats, still as tough as old leather but stunningly, shockingly young. The blue dye in his beard is neat still, and he walks unbowed.

 

"What's with the wavering, lad?" he says, and once again Gimli has to look away.

 

"My balance is off today," he replies with a quick smile, and hopes that it's enough, but as he adjusts the wraps on his grips Dwalin prods him in the shoulder.

 

He blinks.

 

"Excuse me?"

 

Dwalin glowers at him, eyes hard, and Gimli meets his stare with an even, steady gaze. Something prideful in him takes offense, and he lets it bloom for a moment before pushing it aside.

 

The frown eases up a little, and bemusement steals its way over Dwalin's face. It's clearly not somewhere it's had the opportunity to linger, historically.

 

"That's enough with guards for now," He announces to the room at large. "Everybody group up, we'll do some pair sparring."

 

He nods, and tries to think who he was close with when he was this young, who it would be normal for him to partner with-- sparring with Fili or Kili is not even a possibility-- but while he's deliberating a girl is dragged in front of him and Dwalin stomps away.

 

He recognises her, vaguely; Vanya, he thinks, very strong but nervous. Her father fought with his father at Azanulbizar, so he is sort of contractually obliged to be nice to her, which isn't very difficult in any case. She looks away from him, and flips her hammer about half-heartedly before stepping out of distance and grinning at him.

 

"Well," she says, "Come on, then, Gloinul."

 

He tries to focus better, falls into a defensive stance for the hundredth time. She waits for him to swing, and then steps in herself; he moves in to swipe at her legs with viper-speed, and has to pull the swing a little. He'd almost forgotten how to spar, it seems, and isn't quite sure how to keep even his blunted blades non-lethal.

 

She yelps as he catches her shins, and stumbles out of distance; he begins to formulate a plan for how to train that tendency out before leaning back in to attack. He's got her on the defensive almost immediately, and focuses on keeping her that way, because she's used to the offensive, it seems, and it does her a disservice.

 

He's supposed to be learning, not teaching, but there are some things he can't forget. The bright adrenaline of a fight is distant, but there; he tries to sink into it, but everything is too slow, too safe.

 

And then, from behind him with no warning as he darts to the side and catches the beard of his axe under her shield: "What was _that?_ "

 

Without conscious input, the adrenaline flares, and he drops once more, janks at poor Vanya's shield until she's on the floor and he can twist her into a grapple; he lashes out with his other axe, and has it caught on the back of Dwalin's ankle before he can think whether this course of action will get him stabbed.

 

He breathes out hard for a moment, and Dwalin goes very, very still.

 

He slowly, slowly moves the blade away from the skin, and winces as he watches blood rise to the surface. Vanya, elbow under his knee, whimpers quietly.

 

"Oops," he murmurs, and shifts his weight onto his other knee, clambers with excessive care to his feet. Dwalin stares at him with something almost wild in his bright eyes, breathing hard with his hands held up, still.

 

Gimli offers a hand to Vanya, who looks up at him in confusion but takes it; Dwalin's breathing returns to normal as he composes himself.

 

"Mayhaps take a few moments, Gimli," he says, "And I'll have a word with ye while this lot are working on their footwork."

 

Gimli swallows.

 

He walks off the training floor as the cadets array themselves clumsily into lines and start lunging at each other. He still has to suppress the impulse to correct them, but now that he is not sparring like he would with a student it is easier-- and, he reminds himself, most of these dwarves have a century or two to go before they must reach anywhere near battle-ready.

 

Dwalin finishes arranging students to his satisfaction, and steps back with a sharp nod; he turns to glower at Gimli, and ice-water shivers down his spine.

 

"Where did'y learn that?" he snaps, confusion still clinging to his posture.

 

"I didn't, actually," Gimli says, because as he had learned when he was maybe fifty, lying to Dwalin didn't count, and wasn't really lying. In retrospect, Fili and Kili weren't fantastic guides.

 

"I didn't learn anything; it just sort of made sense to at the time."

 

"It made sense to? To _what_? What do you think you were doing?"

 

Gimli remembers, with a little amusement, that he'd once considered Dwalin a superior officer, rather than a colleague and cousin.

 

"You shocked me, sir," He says, unhappily aware that the 'sir' sounds almost mocking, but in this, at least, he is not lying. "I wasn't really thinking, so I . . ."

 

He trails off, and is able to modulate his tone slightly.

 

"I tried to cut your Achilles tendon."

 

//

 

The corridors on this side of the mountain are lit with dim, guttering fires; the light is merely a texture on the darkness in some corners. Gonlí, though, is good at looking through shadows, so the dwarf lingering in the alcove outside the training halls doesn't go as unnoticed as he'd like to.

 

They drift in that way slowly, relaxing their gait and skimming the walls until they're practically invisible-- but the few smudges of light that reach into the alcove spark off the blunt edge of a familiar axe-blade, and they frown.

 

Why is Gimli hiding out here, at this time of day? They pause, and yes, there's the tell-tale stomp of cadets failing to learn martial grace from the halls. As they wait, Gimli leans forward and puts his head in his hands, massaging at his temples with a mannerism strikingly reminiscent of their father.

 

They search their pockets for a moment, coming away with a roll of biscuits, and pad silently towards their brother. He starts as the pastries are held in front of his face, and looks up with a sudden bright smile.

 

"Oh," he says as though on autopilot, "Annon allen--"

 

He stops, as though hearing the strange accent that tumbled out of his mouth, the foreign words, and looks down at the biscuits with an expression that Gonlí had previously seen on a man who had only just realised he'd been stabbed.

 

His face smooths quickly, and Gonlí ponders where a boy who had previously been unable to set a pin on a teacher's chair without giving himself away with his expressions should learn that sort of deception.

 

They form what they hope is an enigmatic smile-- they are learning the value of enigmatic smiles-- and say "I beg your pardon?"

 

"My apologies-- I thank you."

 

He takes the biscuits, a rueful smile shaping his beard. Now that they look seriously at him, it's striking how strangely he's dressed; he's heavily armoured in his cheap training gear, over strangely light clothing. He's dressed like a warrior from the Surface, used to warm air and constant warfare, and now he shivers underground.

 

Gonlí looks him over with a practiced eye, but he has no injuries that they can see, and drug use, this close, is easy to spot.

 

"For what do you watch me so closely?" Gimli says, voice slower and deeper than usual, distantly amused. "What do you hope to see?"

 

"My brother is not behaving like himself. I merely seek an explanation."

 

"Let me keep my own counsel, at least for now."

 

"Well, all right," they say, and join Gimli on the bench, mostly for an excuse to steal some of their own biscuits back.

 

They smirk. "Is your mysterious stranger included in this, or may I ask who you wait on here?"

 

"Pardon?"

 

"You spoke so strangely, just now. You skip training to linger in shadows, and you are surprised to see me. You are expecting to meet someone, and someone is not here. It is only natural that I am _filled_ with curiosity. Oblige me?"

 

"Ah." That sudden grief is back on his face, the strange paleness. "I had thought for a moment that you were someone else, yes, but he is not here, Gonlí, and he never will be, and I know you are clever enough to deduce that this, again, is something I would rather not speak of."

 

They wait.

 

"Is it?" They say quietly.

 

" . . . No. No, it is not."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> writing about fighting is, surprisingly, harder when you've learned how to fight, because I have no idea what proportion of you know what a St. George's Guard is, or why distance is so important in fencing. hm. let me know if it comes across like i'm writing a textbook on medieval weaponry.
> 
> also. if it isn't obvious by now, there are Lots Of OCs, mostly because Tolkien has a lot of heroic characters, but not a lot of childhood friends who are mere doctors or priests or shadowy spies. (Gonli is the nonbinary axe-weilding spy I wanted to be when I was nine.)


	6. who sets the stars in their courses

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> fairy-tales and ill-advised plans

"I relent!" he groans, flinging his arms wide and forcing Tauriel to duck; a fitting retribution, he thought, for hounding him into the citadel with malice aforethought.

 

"I will go to the healers' halls, aye, I will, if it will make you silent," he says, "And Ororin's professors will examine me and confirm that I am hale and well, and then-- promise me this, my friends-- and then I will be allowed to go in peace."

 

Ororin does not promise. He says, "If the healers pronounce you well, I have no authority to keep you against your will, but-- Ai, my prince, you said yourself you have some malady of the brain-- a blood fever, or a fungus . . ."

 

Legolas laughs aloud, and finds himself smiling honestly and truly as he looks through the open windows at the sprawl of the kingdom before him, the shadow of Amon Lanc. He can still see the mark of Sauron-- the way the trees in the distance grow bare and twisted-- but here it is, the land of his childhood.

 

"Elrond in Rivendell can see the future in the surface of a pond, you know," he says airily; "Is it a greater or a lesser skill to live a new age in a dream?"

 

Ororin goes silent; Tauriel rests a hand light on his shoulder.

 

"Is that what you believe happened?" She says, as though talking to an upset child, and he is suddenly very, very sick of his old friends.

 

"From the way you speak, what I believe is of no consequence," he snaps, and shrugs her hand off his shoulder.

 

"Legolas--"

 

He stops, and stares at the junction of corridors ahead of him.

 

"Be silent for a moment, Captain," he says, and then "Would you be so kind as to point me in the direction of the Healer's Halls?"

 

Ororin goes pale, and Legolas smiles wanly in his direction. "This does not support my case, I understand," he says.

 

//

 

The halls are painted white and soft with furnishings, and exactly like every Healer's Halls on Arda. There is the smell of white spirit and boiled herbs, and as the head of the Halls bustles away to check her books he crosses his arms.

 

"Are you not satisfied?" he says, but Ororin only looks more worried.

 

"There are signs of internal bleeding," he says slowly, as if talking to a scared animal, "But your vitals are normal and your reflexes fast."

 

"I could have told you that an hour ago. And, I believe, I did."

 

"You did, at that. But Legolas--"

 

"Did you not make me a promise? I recall that you did. I was promised  _ peace _ , Doctor, and I intend now to survey my Great Greenwood alone, as is my prerogative."

 

"I'm afraid I can't allow that," Ororin says, turning his restless hands together as he steps towards the door. "We'll contact your father as soon as possible, but in the meantime, you're under medical observation."

 

"You will do no such thing--" he says, voice rising until he knows he sounds almost hysterical, but there is half a plan turning in his mind and all of it depends on him having his freedom.

 

//

 

He sits alone in the Healer's Halls, Ororin being engaged with the head of the Halls and Tauriel being vanished in search of a superior officer to justify her actions to, and he listens to the sound of people moving through the corridors as the sun sets.

 

The architecture here is almost jarring; this hall is older than he is, and it shows in the camouflaged lines of restoration mortar under the window-sill, the archaic decorative mosaic of the floor. He had grown used to Ithilien, he realises; the new buildings, the broad glass windows, everything grubby with brick-dust still and fresh, full of people. His people.

 

Here, the windows are still pointed and narrow, and he has to step up to the open arch to see the sky. The sun lies low over the forest, and paints the world in shades of purple and orange. Almost straight above he can see the first shadows of night, the first lone star.

 

He remembers, almost against his will, sitting on a cold, damp hillside with Gimli in the time before Lothlórien. They had raced up, and he thinks (he is not sure) that Gimli had beaten him, in his armour and all. They had been done with running, and stopped to breathe and watch the Fellowship before them as they moved around a campfire. 

 

Then Gimli had lain in the grass, armour upon the ground like the shed skin of a shining snake, and asked the date, and bid him to look up, and the stars had seemed to shift as he watched, a thousand comets burning through the upper atmosphere.

 

They had watched in a rare peace, dew settling on his hair, before Gimli had started to speak. 

 

He spoke of a child's story; that the shooting stars were the distant, burning sparks thrown off by Aulë's forge, and that was why they left the stars unchanged in their orbits. Varda, he'd said, had seen how beautiful they'd been, burning through the dark firmament, and made the stars in their fiery image.

 

"My uncle reasons that it must have been the dwarves that he was crafting with such care," He'd said, voice soft with reminiscence, and Legolas had laughed, incredulous.

 

"You would have me thank the dwarves for the stars?" He'd scoffed, as though the prospect itself as an insult. "No."

 

"There is no use in telling stories to you," Gimli had muttered, breaking the peace of the moment, "You would find an insult in any fairy tale."

 

He had stormed off then, and hadn't looked back at Legolas, and Legolas could find no fault in his cold anger. He'd waited, thinking, on the hillside until the stars were back in their proper places, and then he had carried Gimli's armour back to his bedroll as some weak sort of apology.

 

He comes back to the present almost unwillingly, and find himself suddenly, shockingly dizzy with grief.

 

Before he can sink back into the empty, manic state he’d occupied before there comes a rattling of the door, and his father moves into the room with a swirl of robes, panic flickering over his face. Legolas smiles to see him despite himself; he had been unable to leave Ithilien, and likewise his father tied to Eryn Lesgalen, and he had found himself missing him more than expected.

 

He speaks in Sindarin, a shock after the day's Sylvan-- "I am so sorry-- I only just heard that you were ill, I was seeing to the heads of the council--"

 

He breathes hard, and his face is almost red, eyes wide; he must have ran from the meeting halls. Legolas is struck by an unanticipated fondness.

 

"Be at ease, my father," He says, "You need not be watching for me like an eagle. I understand that you have your responsibilities, and I have mine."

 

"I--" He smiles, broad and shocked; Legolas wonders for a moment how uncomprehending he had been before, that an acknowledgement of the state of things would cause such joy. "Thank you for your understanding. How do you fare? What happened? I knew you should not have been on patrol with the militia."

 

He is clearly working himself up to forbidding that Legolas ever leave his rooms not wrapped in cushions, and Legolas is reminded why they'd argued so.

 

"It is not so!" He says, with perhaps unnecessary force. "For the hundredth time, I suffer nothing, I am not ill. The patrol was uneventful, as they always have been."

 

"As they always have been? My son, this was the first."

 

"Oh, was it?" The clarification as to the date is welcome.

 

He tries to place their first patrol in the grand scheme of events, and returns to his window, and like the hand of Fate it comes across the sky; a shooting star burns across his vision, flaring blue before evaporating into nothing.

The afterimage remains, like a scar across the world.

 

"What is he making now?" he murmurs absently, as he turns the day around in his mind, applies a magnifying-glass to his life.

 

There must be a purpose to this, he decides. Aulë is in his forge, and he is in his past, and if this has happened by random action of space-time or as a great cosmic jest he does not think he could bear it, so there must be a purpose to this. By simple application of logic, then, he is here with a duty.

 

A wind picks up from the North, and he looks over the forest and suppresses a shiver. Amon Lanc encroaches onto the sky like it always has.

 

He turns back to his father, and tries to look as though he is less worried than he feels. "I do appreciate your care," he says, and means it truly, "But may I leave? I have urgent business."

 

His ears twitch at what is not quite a lie.

 

"I will speak to the physician; I am not certain you should be about."

 

He sighs, and takes his father's hands in his own for a moment. "If you must."

 

The Elvenking restores himself to noble composure, and shows himself out with a last, distant smile. Legolas waits until he can no longer hear his footsteps in the hallway before swinging himself onto the windowsill, searching for a foothold.

 

//

 

He wrenches his knife out of the crumbling mortar, and winces at the ruined blade; perhaps there were easier exits than climbing down the side of the tower, but in his defence, the window had been right there. He looks up; the sky is fully dark now, shades of blue and purple, but the meteor shower is over.

 

The city here is just falling asleep, streets quiet, air cool. The bunting for the spring dances is strung along some of the railings, new green shoots rising here and there; it is so purely an image from his childhood that he pauses, reaches for some of the discarded ribbons and pins them up in their proper places. Tomorrow, perhaps, or the day after, the courtyards and bright parks will be loud and joyful with dance and wine and singing, but tonight they are still silent.

 

Then the gravity of his mission returns to him, and he leaves his silent reminiscence, walks away from the palace. 

 

The city fades away into the forest, where the houses melt into the trees and the streets are little more than dirt-paths; it is no Ithilien, but he thinks it beautiful regardless. The beech trees shine pale in the rising moonlight, and small animals move quietly in the underbrush. The last of the snowdrops cluster by his feet, holding out into the spring.

 

It is not long before he comes upon the border. 

 

It takes a little searching, but the line where the Woodland Realm ends and the Mirkwood begins is clear. The grass begins to fade, and is replaced by creeping, thorned vines and nettles; the beech trees are not slender and elegant, but thin as wraiths and twisted, and a fragment of light shines off the watching eyes of something in the shadows.

 

He walks a while, hand on his knife, watching the narrow moon rise, before a border guard comes across him.

 

"Hail," He calls, loud in the night, amusing himself with how the guard jumps.

 

He's sure he'd never been so lax in his patrols.

 

The guard hurries towards him, his dark hair streaming from around his helmet, and stops, balancing on his toes and eyes darting all around.

 

"I'm sorry, sir-- the Captain sent word that you were not to leave the city, and in any case, no-one is to go into the Mirkwood without an escort."

 

Legolas draws himself up, lets affront show cold on his face and flips his knife in his hand-- and the guard flinches, and his eyes are wide with childish fear, and he sighs.

 

"I see," he says, and then when the guard does not relax, "Fear not, I will not stab the messenger, nor chide you form doing your duty. I merely wish it did not come into conflict with me doing mine."

 

The guard nods, still fearful, but he does trail Legolas back to the city and does not let him behind him, which does him some little credit.

 

He leaves him at the boundaries, and walks back into the city slowly, skimming the shadows. He could walk through to the other side, hope that he could out-run the guards-- but for all his jests, the patrols are competent, and if they know a region, they'll find him eventually.

 

He feels like the waves, crashing on a cliff with hopes of wearing a path; at every turn his friends and family have, with no maliciousness, shot down his plans. A wave may wear down a cliff, in time, but it is far easier, he thinks, to find a river.

 

//

 

He tries not to set his eyes on anything as he packs a bag, lets his old quarters blur into the background as he methodically folds travelling-shirts-- of which he has precious few, and all too rich with embroidery and fine material-- and decides how many knives he can reasonably carry.

 

Then he sits down at his old writing-desk, with the letter-paper hardly touched and the old green pen, and he writes, in as clear a hand as he can make while his hands shake--

 

"My father;

 

If I ask you to not chase me when you find me missing, I know you will ignore it, and were I in your place I would do the same, so I shall not ask. I have a rather more important request of you: do not take me as a madman when I tell you that the Enemy has returned to Dol Guldur . . ."

 

//

 

He walks down to the wine-cellars as the music of the spring dances winds its way into the palace.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> legolas keeps making,,, just,,,, appalling decisions. big idiot. A Longbow Won't Fit In A Barrel, Leggy.
> 
> haven't had time to properly read this over, so if any part of this is misspelled/grammar weird/obviously Wrong, let me know.


	7. the shadow of the monarcy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> shenaigans and communication

They have not done this since they were all children, before Gimli joined the guard, but it seems the best and only way to talk of this, curled in secret on Camlin's bed beneath the covers. Gonlí guards a candle with care, and they both glow red in the low light.

 

"Two days ago, my closest friend died," he begins, and the telling is hard, but some tight wire in his chest loosens as he speaks. "In an elven colony in Gondor."

 

He makes eye contact with Camlin for a moment, who watches him quietly, with her big pale eyes, and he looks away again, watching the flame of the candle. "I was there, because I was negotiating yet another trade agreement, and because we had a boat to build. Because-- as of several decades-- I had been Lord of Aglarond, the great glittering halls of Helm's Deep."

 

//

 

Camlin paces across the small room, footsteps loud on the stone. She draws several books from her shelves, peers at the covers and sets them back, flipping though one weathered blue tome before closing it with a snap and sighing.

 

"Prophecy comes in unexpected forms; dreams, omens, star-watching," she says, with a trace of the great teacher she would become in her voice. "There are stories of prophecy-dreams lasting almost a year; I see no reason why the Valar might not send you a vision of the future whole and unbroken."

 

She frowns, and drums her fingers on her desk. "It would be strange-- unprecedented-- but not outside of the realms of possibility. Though it sounds as if you have made a habit of ignoring the realms of possibility."

 

Gimli cannot help but smile at the almost accusing tilt of her eyes.

 

"Aye, that I certainly have-- will have? Will? Will, possibly? Shall?"

 

Gonlí leans forward, teeth bared in a smile that they would probably like to believe was roguish.

 

"I will not debate the semantics when there is a far more interesting question: what, O' Great Hero, is a hobbit?"

 

Gimli suppresses a wince at the title, and takes shelter in the knowledge that Gonlí has never admired anyone in their life, and is mocking him.

 

He thinks for several seconds, and says, "Imagine a barrel, and give it feet-- large, fuzzy ones-- and arms and a head, but no beard, and paint it a sort of brown, and give it pointed ears, and a stomach with no end, and a spirit and will of astonishing strength-- no, let me start again; imagine a rabbit--"

 

Gonlí's nose creases as they laugh. "I would be quite certain you have made them up to fool me, except for how I know your nose turns red when you so much as think an untruth."

 

Gimli gasps in jest, and puts on a flimsy mask of seriousness.

 

"Actually, I am almost competent at falsehoods by now," he says, and crosses his eyes to peer at his nose as heat rises in his face.

 

//

 

Gonlí has to leave, sooner-or-later, as they always have. Gimli watches as they fiddle with their cloak and name people that he knows aren't, and never have been, their friends;  _ I know _ , he wants to say,  _ you don't have to hide from me--  _ but he doesn't say it, as he never has.

 

Camlin, however, has nowhere to go and no-one to pretend to be, and she sits with her legs crossed on her desk and stares him down. 

 

"What," he says, and they, almost laughing, as she keeps staring, "What!"

 

"You have made many friends," she says.

 

"I had, at that. I had come to know many honourable people, and some of them liked me almost half as much as I liked them."

 

"And what will you do, now."

 

"What will I do? Help our adad make supper, if I am not very much mistaken."

 

"I have seen you play the fool a great many times. I should thank you not to try it on me."

 

"You mean to ask, what am I planning to do about the War?"

 

"I have never cared about war. You know this. It makes me itch."

 

"It is not so simple as that. It is not something that can be talked around or ignored."

 

"Everything can be talked around or ignored. But I do not speak of that either. No, my stone-skulled brother, I mean to ask when I will meet these dear companions, so that they can be judged."

 

"Ah," he says. "Most probably never."

 

There is something dangerous in the slant of her eyebrows. "I do not mean to keep you from them-- or to protect them, more likely, from you-- but of the Fellowship only one is yet born, and our King would have you believe that he is an enemy. And of my friends since then-- too distant, or too young, or not themselves yet, or they would not speak to me if they saw me. Or all at once."

 

"Our King," she murmurs, "What a strange phrase."

 

He can see that she has just begun to grasp his situation. She searches for something to busy her hands with, and Gimli has to pace slowly across the floor, too restless to lie.

 

"The elf," she says suddenly. "He lives yet, you said."

 

"Aye. But he is not yet  _ my _ Legolas, for all that he is Legolas. He walks his forest and is yet almost a child, despite his age; he has not faced Sauron with despair in his heart, or mastered state-craft, or learned to bake a pork pie."

 

"I see."

 

The noise of the hammers rings quiet in the distance; it must be late, then. He finds himself with a strange desire to go to the surface and look upon the moon.

 

"You looked so lonely, is all," she says suddenly into the air. "We sit with you, and yet you look like a stranger without a friend in all the mountain."

 

He smiles, and it is unconvincing. "How could I be lonely when I have the finest sister in all the great wide world and those beyond?"

 

She mimes throwing her books at him, and he laughs as he walks out of the door.

 

//

 

His legs, Legolas has learned very well, are much longer than those of a dwarf, and he will only bend so far, and he has become very well acquainted with his knees in the past hour. 

 

Galion walks past every so often, recognisable by the clinking of his keys and the way he stumbles progressively more each time, and each time Legolas' heart leaps into his throat. First it is with fear that he will be discovered, and then as his back begins to ache it is with the hope that he will be sent down the river at long last.

 

He has had to leave his longbow behind, and though it is no Galadhrim masterwork bow he misses it already. His hair will smell of red wine, he thinks, for weeks or years.

 

Such is his mind occupied with irritation that he almost doesn't notice when the lever is pulled, but the great lurching and the noise of grinding mechanisms and white-water is unmistakable.

 

Thus begins the worst hour of his life.

 

It is like-- it is like being inside a barrel as it goes down a waterfall. There are few other ways to describe the violence with which he is flung onto the wooden slats, the way that the noise fills the entire world. He is soon damp through, and he fears for the state of his travelling supplies.

 

He fears his knees may be bruised for the rest of his life.

 

Mercifully, the churning does not last forever, though the cold and the damp seem to be constants of barrel travel. 

 

(It is enough, perhaps, to put him off water travel entirely, for all that his boat had been so beautiful.)

 

Slowly, slowly, he decelerates, and there is only the drip-drip-drip of water to tell him that he is moving at all-- and then, distant but there, the voices of men upon the river.

 

Laketown.

 

He is able to throw the barrel to something almost upright, and then with judicious application of the flat of his palm he pries up the top. Feeling incredibly silly, he raises his head into the air like a hare from its burrow, and comes face-to-face with the worst possible thing: a witness.

 

A man is squinting at him in bafflement, sun-beaten and scruffy, and Legolas fights to keep his face straight as he keeps from panicking and tries to place his face. He has a crook around the barrel, towing it with his boat, and the barrel carrying Legolas' provisions and clothes and equipment is propped up on the crumbling prow. A crowbar is lodged in its lid.

 

"That was incredibly undignified," he says, as smooth and unruffled as he can manage, "So I should be very much obliged if you could forget that you saw me, and return my possessions."

 

"Sorry, friend," he says, and there-- in that polite hostility, so similar to his father, he sees Bard, King of Dale. "Smuggling goes straight to the Master."

 

He manages to extract himself without toppling straight into the river, though he is sure he was not exceptionally graceful while he did so.

 

"I," he says grandly, aware of his damp hair and the smell of wine and water, "Am no criminal, and I shall not go anywhere for your Master of Laketown, and what would your daughters think if they knew that you were holding my pack hostage?"

 

Bard leans back in shock, eyebrows drawing together and mouth falling open, and Legolas takes the slightly cruel advantage, and gives him a single hard shove, which unbalances him just enough that he has to swing his arms about and reach for the sides of the boat as Legolas swings his pack onto this back and leaps for the bank.

 

The water seeps, freezing, into his boots as he disappears into the forest, calling out a heartfelt "My apologies!" as he goes.

 

//

 

There is a fascination mechanism in many old, warren-like Dwarven homes to bring a door-bell ringing to every room in the cavern; there is also a fascinating Dwarven mechanism to ensure that said door is answered, which usually consists of his Adad bellowing the name of one of his children with enough volume to wake the dead. It is this mechanism that drives Gimli from his simmering stew to the front door. 

 

A young dwarrowdam hovers on the doorstep, dark hair only just curling on round cheeks, dressed in worn but well-cared-for ceremonial blues. She flushes a little, and then says, in a voice that suggests she's been practicing on the walk, "The Princess Dis requests the presence of Gimli son of Gloin to speak on a matter of great importance."

 

This is unanticipated. Why had he not anticipated this?

 

Away to their work his mothers had went, stateswomen both, as proud of him as any parents have ever been; in what world could they have not told the Princess of his fabled stroke of prophecy? 

 

"Aye," he says, voice hoarse. "We will be along shortly."

 

She seems unable to process the idea that he is not leaving immediately, and he walks slowly and calmly back towards his childhood bedroom, discarding plans and hoping desperately that at sixty years of age he had owned something neat enough to meet the Princess in.

 

The answer to that, of course, is no, but he buttons himself, with shaking fingers, into the next best thing. He is, it is now evident, incredibly uncomfortable here without his armour. 

 

//

 

In Erebor, it had been clear when one passed the boundary from the craftsmen's district-- sprawling and sparkling though it had been-- to the Royal Quarters. Here it is not. 

 

The corridors are still narrow, rough-hewn; the windows are still few and far between, and the torches are the same oil-pastel smears of red and white in the darkness. But there is, as he walks in silence, a sort of heaviness to the air, an expectant stillness.

 

He wonders if it might just be nervousness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> whats up i hate the concept of a monarcy and Fucking Tolkien had to make his goddamn kings interesting


	8. awkward conversations

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Princess Dis; Legolas gets into another fight.

The Princess' quarters are a marvel in Ered Luin in that they have windows. The evening's golden light rolls across the room, and somehow after the caverns that seems more opulent than the heavy blue fabrics and the swords hung, shining, on the walls. She looks at him with narrow eyes, and smoke curls from the incense braided into her dark beard.

 

It's impressive, especially on her budget. The sunset light, he thinks, would not be nearly so impressive if it were not glowing through several centuries of dust. The incense trick he vaguely remembers using himself, to negotiate with a would-be war-lord. He had not been able to turn his head for fear of setting his clothes alight, but he had been spoken of as some sort of fire spirit for a time afterwards, which he had very much enjoyed.

 

Statescraft is in many ways a sort of elaborate performance; he had never been very good at it, but he was very good at seeing _through_ it. Aged sixty-eight he had thought Dis was some sort of terrifying spectre of law and competence; now that he is fully grown and aware how she does it he finds that his opinion is mostly unchanged.

 

"Princess," he says as the door is closed behind him; she smiles for all of a second, and waves him in with fingers weighed down with rings.

 

"Gimli, son of Gloin," she replies, and smiles like a dragon. "How fares your _Nadad_?"

 

She is testing, maybe, to see what he knows-- or she is merely polite.

 

"Gonli is well. Occupied with work."

 

She makes a silence for him to fill, and he keeps his mouth firmly closed. He is thinking of this, as much as he may dislike it, as some sort of hostile negotiation. She narrows her dark eyes.

 

"I am told that you brought some unexpected news to your mother this morning, Gimli son of Gloin," she says lazily.

 

He still does not reply. She has not yet asked him a question, and he may be a poor liar but he has enough guile for this.

 

"I am told you spoke of plans that my brother has made, in secret, that he has not told to you. Is this true?"

 

"It is."

 

She waves to the tea-set in front of her, and he takes a seat with exactly as much ease as she is carefully displaying.

 

"How is it, if you would, that a cadet guardsman, not yet of his majority, still without his battle-tattoos and honours, should hear of plots and schemings that have not crossed my ears?"

 

He leans forward. "He did not tell you of his expedition?"

 

The muscle under her eye twitches. "He has not. I wonder if you will."

 

He puts the teacup down and carefully straightens his posture from the diplomatic lounge; he does not have the patience to maintain the image for too long, and hopes she does not either.

 

"I will. It is more your business than mine. Thorin plans to take a party of thirteen to Erebor, leaving in the spring; he hopes to find the dragon dead, or left, or to kill it while it sleeps, knowing of a secret door that will take him to the chamber where it lies."

 

"Who told you?"

 

Her eyes are bright, and she is stiff now, having either given up or lost the pretence.

 

"I had a dream, one bright and real with magic, and I saw many things, fools and kings alike."

 

"You dreamed a year ahead? You saw this expedition?"

 

"I saw Erebor, aye."

 

"Why do you tell me this?"

 

"Thorin would take your sons."

 

She almost snarls, and he is proud that he does not flinch-- but her face is smooth again in a moment, regal.

 

"And how will Erebor treat my sons, magician?"

 

He has to take a moment to speak, and she sees in that the answer.

 

"Can you-- do you believe you can prevent this?"

 

"I would seek your permission to try."

 

She closes her eyes, and breathes out slowly.

 

"Do you believe you can prevent this, and still give our people back their ancient home?"

 

He has never had so much respect for anyone as he does for her in that moment, weighing love against the whole future of the Dwarves, but the part of him that is still sixty-eight and missing his first friends hates her a little.

 

He has to think about it-- what he knows of the Elven-King, of the battle, of gold-sickness and the false-Silmaril-- but ultimately he does.

 

"I make no promises, but aye, I think I could."

 

She almost sobs, folding in on herself, and for her sake he pretends he does not notice as she builds herself back together.

 

"Anything you need, Gimli son of Gloin, if it is in my power I will grant it."

 

She speaks in clear Khuzdul, and the words are almost an oath.

 

"Know this, however: I trust you because of lifelong love of your mothers and your friendship with my sons. I believe that though you might lie to me, you would not lie to them. If I discover that you have-- and you are well aware of the ways I have to uncover such falsehoods-- you will never be welcome among Khazad again, oathless and honourless, no kingdom and no House, and you will starve on the cold mountain-side alone."

 

He accepts the promise without a word; there is no dispute or reassurance he can make.

 

She stares at him, cold, for several seconds, before nodding curtly.

 

“You may leave,” she says, and he _hates_ how he knows that that is a very, very careful reminder that it is up to her if he may not. He is very good at diplomacy, and wishes he wasn’t.

 

//

 

The forest is deep and sweet and dark, and he walks without hurry between the slim trees. Eyes watch from the shadows, but Legolas knows not to pay them any mind. In the Mirkwood, anything that waits rather than attacking outright is waiting because it is afraid.

 

The shadows now lie in the Mirkwood, it seems.

 

He walks, untroubled, through the forest. Past the city he walks, around, away from the mountain and the tower and Sauron. The evening is cold, white winter still clinging to his footsteps, and though he hears the joyful singing of his home he walks to the borders.

 

Two days he goes on, eating from the trees and what his shortbow brings him, and the marks of habitation and civilisation fade. The marks of the Enemy do not, though as he travels downhill they are easier to ignore, the dancing rivers and the deer that race past and then freeze, blinking at him, and race onwards.

 

He is a Wild Elf, after all, and when he comes to the tree line it costs him much to leave the forest, for all that it has not been his home these last centuries. But before him is the great valley of the Anduin.

 

There are fields, few and far between, glowing golden, and the pale grass and rich dark earth. The river-- the river where the whole thing had begun-- is wide and dark with snow-melt, slinking low. Above it all the mountains are deep blue, surrounded and drenched in cloud.

 

A long way to walk alone. He has been thinking as he travels, and now that he sees the scale of the Misty Mountains he has to bite back acid despair. To climb into the cold is no hardship, for he is sure that they are as beautiful as they have always been, but to find under them the Goblin-Town, stronghold of the Orcs, and travel through and under it to trace Smeagol, in his native warrens and caverns?

 

He is not sure that he could do it in a thousand years, and he has very few.

 

He would not turn back now for all the gold upon the earth and under it, not with all at stake, but he sees little option. Must he wait another sixty years, be a witness as the Mirkwood dies, and mind his Fellowship-- who would not be his Fellowship at all, not really-- as they suffered it all again?

 

 

He could, he thinks. If that should be his burden, he could bear it-- if only he had Gimli beside him. He wonders why this power that had thrown him so far, through space and time, backwards through the weave of fate, had separated them. In all these centuries they had been as one, and not been separated, and named in re-tellings of the War together or not at all.

 

It makes no sense, now that he applies his mind to the puzzle. Perhaps-- perhaps, he reasons, he is not so alone as he seems, and Gimli is now in his mountains with that same bright mind that had accompanied him all these years, thinking the same things, wondering of his well-being.

 

He hopes not, for Gimli’s sake, for he has a suspicion that that would require him to die also, and he would far rather have him live out the rest of his days in their young city, to die peacefully and pass into the arms of Aule. For his own sake, for his peace of mind and happiness, he hopes that Gimli is yet here, but-- he tells himself-- such hopes are fanciful, and will hurt him in the end.

 

He shakes such dark thoughts from his head as he walks deeper into the valley, longing for a horse and for provisions as a way to prevent himself from longing for things that he may never have. The ground is only just beginning to green with spring, and the sky is heavy with rain-clouds, and he steps over many fast-flowing streams and tributaries, full of tiny silvery fish that move as one thing as he dips his fingers in the cool water.

 

A great stone pillar peers over the high rim of the valley, and he makes for it as the first landmark, a place to look out and see if he might make out the place where Gollum left the mountains.

 

The clouds cluster and grow, turning dark and racing each other over the sun, and it is almost noon when he finds the warg, dead in the dirt with a hatchet embedded in its wiry neck. Its grey fur is the same colour as the slate sky, and as he bends to find the trail of its footprints the first of the rain begins to fall.

 

He finds footprints, and many of them, orcs and wargs both, and several broken and poorly-made orcish arrowheads, and these he follows down the river, as the stones turn black with water and the sky opens up. Distant, on the rising wind, he hears the howls and bellows of brawling beasts. He follows, arrows in hand, keeping low and quiet as he makes his way up towards the carrock.

 

There is a shirt-- patchwork and worn, man-shaped but enormous-- trod into the earth, and torn with claws, and he begins to fear for the life of whoever the orcs were hunting.

 

There it comes again-- a bellow, as if belonging to some great beast, and the howling and yelping of wolves. He readies his bow, and creeping quiet climbs to the top of the next ridge.

 

Orcs and wargs there are, yes, bleeding and snarling and some gasping on the ground, but it is not a man they fight; a bear, mountain-broad and dark with blood, towers on its haunches in a ragged circle of assailants. It slashes with heavy claws, and bites and tears, but it is clearly struggling.

 

Legolas takes careful aim, and an arrow is flying straight and sure through the eye of the largest warg; he steps up onto the stone as they turn to him, but though he shoots fair the range is not ideal. They scramble up the bank, slipping in the mud, falling and spitting in the Black Speech, until he can smell their raw-meat breath and see the spittle in the jaws of the wolves.

 

One is far too close-- it raises its crude shield, and lashes out at the curve of his bow until it splints while he struggles to bring the arrow in line. To have come so far, and fall at this first hurdle-- but he hefts his shattered bow like a club, and while it cackles at its victory he hits it hard, once, over the head.

 

 

Two more he takes down this way, dancing back, until he is unable to retreat any further, and reaches for his knife-- but as he draws it from his waist the noise the metal makes tells him that in his climb he had damaged it enough that it keeps no cutting edge. As he curses himself, one of the last wolves drops through his guard, and he sees its bloodied yellow eyes, its blunt teeth-- heavy claws tear through the air, and the great bear stands over the wolf, snarling.

 

He freezes, and the rain falls. Having sufficiently terrified the now-dead wolf, the bear turns to him, glaring through beetle-bright eyes.

 

Legolas carefully steps away, attempting to breathe as little as possible, and the bear rears onto its hind legs and says “You have my thanks.”

 

His voice is low and grunting, and he seems very human for a bear, even putting aside the speech; in all his time, Legolas had encountered stranger things than animals with human voices, though usually, in his experience, it was foxes.

 

“You are very welcome, Mister Bear,” he replies, while retreating steadily, because as he has been told many times, manners cost nothing.

 

 

“We see few elves in the Valley,” the bear replies, in a tone akin to distant acquaintances making conversation. “From where are you coming, and where do you go?”

 

“I come from the Elven-kingdom in the Mirkwood,” he says, unwilling to give his destination. “In all my life I have not heard of bears native to Rhovanion.”

 

“We are not native,” the bear replies, and suddenly he seems shorter, face flatter, arms longer. He begins walking, a gait strange for a bear, and looks over he shoulder with human eyes at Legolas. “Follow me, Mister Elf of Mirkwood. You have helped me much, and I will repay your kindness.”

 

Legolas blinks, and seeing precious few options, he follows.


	9. the pastry interlude

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in which the author gets very sappy and abandons all pretence at subtlety.

The bear walks along the river, and as it pads through the mud on the bank it shrinks further, until it is not a man-like bear but a bear-like man. He is still tall as the sky, dirt-caked and dripping with rainwater. 

“You have uncommon skill in fighting orcs. I see such rarely.”

“I have had all the practice I could ask for.”

He turns back towards Legolas as they walk, and his eyes are the same, dark and shining.  "Do they venture into the Greenwood, then? I had felt a shifting in the shadows, but hoped not, for your sake and mine."

"We see orcs and goblins in the Forest rarely, but less rarely than in the past."

"That bodes ill indeed."

Legolas swallows, and attempts to find a politic title to use, seeing as he has not introduced himself and 'Mister Bear' no longer seems appropriate.

"Sir--" he starts, and then the Bear-Man turns around again. 

"Come with me.  The rain has set in early tonight, and if you wait much longer it will be tearing the tree-tops down and stirring the river to violence. I have guest-rooms and a warm fire."

"Thank you," he says instead of the many things he wants to say, and follows.

The Bear-Man introduces himself, at long last, as Beorn, and leads him over the river towards the great stone hill, and through a thicket of oaks and thorned brambles. His house is low to the ground, over-large and wooden in a very old style, and built, from the number of entrances, for many people, but it is empty.

Food is laid out, honey and seed-cakes and fresh salads and warm bread, and the fire glows bright; he is a little in awe at the hospitality, which is of the kind he would expect from a Lord, not a strange man in the forest. It is a little eerie, even before a rabbit that comes up to his knee delivers him a cup of tea. The Hobbits had told him, once, of a man in the wilderness who had done much the same-- Legolas had listened for hours as Frodo spoke of the stories that he had told, of the music of the Ainur and the shaping of the Earth, and it had been very strange, but it had seemed to bring Frodo a sort of peace.

It does not seem to be the same thing-- the Hobbits' Tom had been very short, reportedly, and there are no damp river-ladies in evidence here, and he is very far from their Old Forest-- but he begins to accept that this sort of thing just happens to travellers sometimes, and that if Beorn should give him a significant-looking knife, he should keep tight hold of it.

But Beorn, after offering the use of his rooms and his fire and his pantry-cupboards, also offers a horse, and there is only so much hospitality that Legolas can abide before things get ridiculous.

"No, sir!" he says. "I cannot accept such a gift in good faith without giving something in exchange."

"What would you give, then, knowing that I have no use for gold and you have already come to my aid in a battle that might have slain me?"

Legolas thinks on it for several minutes, and says "I will trade for this horse a true tale of great value, and for a recipe for the finest travelling-meal one can serve, both of which you would not hear from another for all the love and money in the world, for none know them yet but I."

"Secrets for a horse? It seems that I win more than you, in this trade."

"Then I shall ask for more-- the story and the recipe, in exchange for a horse, a bottle of black ink, and the finest needles you have."

They shake hands on it, and with all the mirth of hindsight (and the bitterer mirth of someone whose knees are still bruised) he tells the story of how fell down the river in a barrel as he fled his kingdom.

Beorn is a good listener, a man who is clearly accustomed to doing nothing but, and they sit in the warm of his halls as the rain beats grey against the windows and the hearth glows golden.

"Tell me, sir," he says after Legolas treasures the rare peace of it for several minutes, "From what were you fleeing?"

"Hm?"

"You ran away, my friend, and not from the pressures of your position or questions about your health."

"Perhaps I did," he says, and sips his sweet tea.

He closes his eyes and sees it, the fear that had been under his skin. It is clear and plain now, though he had not noticed at the time, how it had made him erratic and panicked, told him to flee and keep fleeing.

He wants to speak-- to say  _ I was poisoned, and I died and woke up, and it was a friend who killed me, and now I may never know who sought to hurt me thus or why.  _ He wants to say,  _ I did not feel safe in my childhood bedroom with guards on the walls and my friends in reach, and so I fear I will never feel safe again.  The one person who would fix this, I know, who would be as a fortress against my fears and slow my heartbeat, he is out of my reach now and I am terrified he will always be far from me. _

He keeps his mouth firmly closed against the words, and feels cold all over.

The rain falls and runs in curtains down the thick glass, and far in the distance is the sound of thunder.

"Do not fear for me," he says at last as Beorn raises a heavy eyebrow. "Or for you. No threat follows my footsteps. Now, did I not promise a pastry?"

"I am curious indeed as to what recipe you have that I could learn nowhere else."

"Well!" He says with a smile, warming to his subject as a distraction. "The Ithilien Clanger is a strange beast,  and it is so exclusive because it took me all my strength to learn the recipe upon which is is based-- it is indeed the only thing I can cook--"

He launches into the rambling tale of how Gimli had unwisely said, off-hand, that he couldn't make an Ered Luin Clanger if he tried--

//

“No, Sir Elf,” Gloin had said, hunched over his desk, his hair fallen around his face. “I shan’t teach you.”

“Why?”

He’d sighed, and put his pen down with unnecessary force. “I think you would be a poor student, and would not waste my time.”

“This may be true, I admit,” said Legolas, leaning on the doorway with his head against the ceiling, “But that is not all, I think.”

“Oh, do you think?”

“I think that you dislike me.”

“So you are clever, after all!”

“Purportedly.”

Gloin looked at him with raised eyebrows, awaiting his exit.

“Why?” said Legolas again, with a smile.

“Ah, your favourite word!”

“Your wife likes me.”

“My wife thinks you are some sort of infant dog that Gimli has brought home.”

“And you do not.”

“No, I do not!” he burst out all of a sudden, the muscles around his eyes tight. “Your father imprisoned me! You called Gimli a goblin-mutant, you brawled with him at the Council and by all reports have brawled with him ever since, until he comes home to Erebor one morning and reports that you are his closest friend in all the world! I can make neither heads nor tails of it.”

He had subsided then, and went back to glaring with a sigh.

Legolas took a moment to marshal his thoughts. “We did not brawl.”

“You brawled. I was there.”

“Perhaps we brawled. Perhaps.”

“No clever rebuttal for the rest of it?”

“I have none,” he had said, serious. “I do not claim to be wise— I should be struck down immediately for such a statement— but I can say at least that I am wiser than I was. To insult the picture that you carried was childish, and as for what occurred at the Council, I have little defence. I was raised in a small corner of the Earth, and I acted on what I knew, all of which I had been taught by my father. You know how he thinks of the Dwarves.”

“And now you say that you know better?”

“I do. I joined the Fellowship to learn more of the wide world, and certainly I achieved that goal.”

“You went to Mordor with the purpose of travel? Like some sort of walking holiday?”

He shrugged. “I had some small desire to prevent annihilation of society, but otherwise, yes.”

“Do you truly care for nothing?”

“I care for your son.”

Gloin stared at him blankly, before snorting. “Are you aware of how you sound?”

He thought on it for a moment, and replied honestly, “No.”

Gloin then appeared to turn back to his work, before putting down his pen with a sigh and turning back. “And what of your father? Does he approve of this? I doubt it.”

“On the contrary! The friendship between my father and Gimli is one of the chief mysteries and principal vexations of my life. Within moments of meeting they had gone from glaring to commiserating about me. I live in fear that they will one day plot together to have me happily married against my will and never allowed to raise arms again.”

“Sir Elf, do you listen at all to the things that you say?”

“Never.” He smiled again.

Gloin put his head in his hands and curled his fingers in his hair for a moment before sighing again. He had seemed to be a dwarf with a talent for sighing.

“I give in,” he said, with the tone of a man defeated. “I will teach you. You will never let me rest if I do not.”

“I’m glad you understand the situation,” Legolas had replied. 

//

They had spent an inordinate amount of time making batches of shortcrust pastry and caramelising onions, and Legolas remembers how the coal ovens had warmed the whole cavern, and how his first four attempts had split in half or burned entirely. He remembers with a wholly different type of warmth how Gimli had smiled when he'd served one, complete finally, and how he had said with a shake of his head that he had thought only that he'd do best to start with a simpler thing to cook, considering Legolas could bake precisely nothing when they'd met.

"It is so difficult to find cinnamon in Ithilien," he'd said later that evening. "We'll have to come up with some other variation when we go back."

The way that he had said 'when--' as though there was absolutely no question about it . . . 

//

He trails off in the telling, because there is something about it that is too big for the story he is telling, how there had been no trace of a question in Gimli's speech and how he had known, then, that he would walk beside Gimli for as long as he and the Valar would permit it.

His time is up, it appears.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The pastry described is a Dwarvish variation on the Bedfordshire Clanger, a sweet-and-savoury baked roll with a meat filling in one end and sweetened fruit in the other. They're delicious.
> 
> Also, edit: I drew some portraits! The designs I'm using for the lads are here: https://www.pillowfort.io/posts/475469


	10. glass, jade, porcelain

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> dwarf talks to people, regrets it

The next days are some sort of work-weary dream.

  


He shuts himself in his rooms when he can, and shapes tiny, intricate things from the dark jade of the Blue Mountains. A curled dragon, the length of his thumb, bares its glittering teeth at the world, and his father looks at it with fearful eyes as he hides in Gimli's room from his Ammad. He looks even stranger at the shining relief of the Gates of Khazad-Dum, which Gimli makes anew and carries in his pocket as a carved reminder.

  


"I fear for this journey," his father says as the evening draws late. "You look so grave, now, and older than you ought."

  


"You need not worry," he replies at last, choosing the finest sandpaper he has. "You will come to no serious harm between here and Erebor."

  


"No, my son, I fear for you."

  


Gimli does not speak for several moments as he applies himself to his craft, and then says, "If all goes as I have dreamt it, I shall live long enough and venture far enough to outstay every welcome between here and Far Harad."

  


The trinket he is crafting is passed to his father, who holds it to the light and narrows his eyes.

  


"This is a masterpiece."

  


"Nothing of the sort," he laughs half-heartedly. "It is a statue of a warhorse in a poor imitation of the Rohan style, and that is all, and it is not yet finished."

  


He reaches for his polishing cloth, and as he applies a shine to the flanks of the statuette he says "His name is Arod."

  


"Nice name," says his father with the lightness that comes from a complete lack of understanding. "Have you slept at all, or did you come home from training yesterday and just start making these? Only Dwalin asked after you, and I could swear the light was on when I left this morning."

  


"No," he says. "I have not slept. I do not want to."

  


"If you are so confident in your longevity and prosperity, what do you fear seeing?"

  


Gimli puts down his tools at last, and stands up, with restlessness humming in his blood. "There are many things that might befall a person, and yet leave them alive-- more alive than those around them, at least. And I am not afraid to sleep."

  


"You are not afraid?"

  


"No, I am not. I am angry, which is more useful. I will not tell you why, because-- ah, you worry so much already, and I am only speaking in hypotheticals!"

  


He steps close, and gently butts his father's forehead with his own. "Trust me," he says. "That is all that I am asking of you."

  


"Aye, I do, but-- It is only that you are so young, and you do not seem to know it."

  


_"Trust me."_

  


His father smiles slowly, and nods. "I do, as I always have done, and so I trust that I do not have to treat you as if you were an infant and tell you to go to bed."

  


"Indeed you do not."

  


  
//

  


If the past days have been a weary dream, then it follows that when he makes the next morning and finds Fili and Kili in his hallway that he has fallen into a feverish sort of nightmare.

  


"Morning," Fili chirps, while Gonli makes frantic faces of apology from behind him.

  


"Your Nadad says you've been ill. Said we weren't to see you," says Kili, as Gimli glares at the rock beside his left ear and pretends this isn't happening.

  


"But we think its a little more than that. Obviously you're ill-- I love you like family but you look like shit-- but you were so well in training the other day that you nearly killed Vanya, and you weren't talking to us then either."

  


"So, by that and by the magic of scientifical deduction, I worked out that you're pissed at us."

  


"It's six in the morning, why on Earth would I be drunk," Gimli starts, while Kili starts explaining how, actually, _he'd_ worked it out.

  


"Not smashed-pissed, angry-pissed."

  


"I--" Gimli trails off. "Not quite."

  


Kili looks at him, head cocked, distracted from his tirade momentarily, and says very quietly, "Oh. Oh, this is about Erebor."

  


Gimli swallows, and turns to the living room. He's not about to face this conversation without a cup of something warm and sweet. "You could say that," he says, once they are out of his field of vision.

  


"Are you-- are you mad that you can't come? Because that isn't exactly up to us--"

  


"When did you plan on telling me?"

  


They crowd onto a sofa, and Fili chews sheepishly on his thumb. He gets as far as "Um," before Gimli speaks again.

  


"I would invite you to consider a scenario, all in the hypotheticals. In this scenario, I announce suddenly that I am going away, with a large delegation but not with you, all of whom have known for months that they would be leaving. The next day, I am gone.”

  


“All is quiet from me-- no letters, or few letters, and those are official documents. You have only the barest clue where I am going, and then after almost a year a raven comes bearing news that I have died in a skirmish, far from home and without my friends, but the good news is that I have succeeded on this mission of which you have heard little, and this is- you are told-- this is more important. Hypothetically, you understand."

  


The fire crackles, and he brings out a tray of tea. "Would you be angry?"

  


The echoes of activity deeper in the mountain roll over the room as Gimli, with great care, pours himself a cup and slices ginger into it.

  


“We-- We’re not going to die,” says Kili quietly.

  


“Perhaps not, but did Thorin not decide to keep your route and ultimate goal concealed?”

  


“How do you know this? Who told you?”

  


“Nobody told me.” He smiles without amusement, and taps the side of his nose. “I’m very clever, that’s all.”

  


There is a moment of silence as they both digest that bit of obfuscation.

  


"And you're not going to shout?"

  


"What would that do? I shan't convince you not to leave. Besides, I have had time enough to cool my temper."

  


He remembers, viscerally, how he'd been bone-deep furious at first, quicker than the grief. Time wears high mountains down, indeed, and it has brought the anger down to a low simmer, but all of eternity would not douse the flames entirely.

  


"What," says Fili, "Three days? I've seen you hold a grudge so long that your dad started to draw it a chair at the table."

  


"Maybe I've grown up."

  


"Nonsense. You're still shorter than me."

  


He laughs, even though the joke isn't even approaching funny, and tentative smiles crawl across both of their faces at once. He swallows, and thinks for your moment.

  


"In your places," he says slowly, "I would have done the same, and as such I shall do my best to bear no grudge."

  


He _had_ done the same, in fact, haring off to Mordor without a good letter to his mothers, and no real contact until they were back at Erebor, and so for all that he is bitter he cannot quite muster the energy to be properly mean about it.

  


"Thanks, Gimli," Kili says in a rush, words coming out all on top of each other. "We really did want to tell you, but-- you know how Thorin gets--"

  


(He doesn't, actually. He's forgotten.)

  


Gimli smiles broadly, setting his tea and that unpleasant thought aside, and stands up. "Well!" he says, "Now that that has been discussed, do we not all have training? A hot chisel does not rust, after all!”

  


//

  


The pair of them have been happy to snipe at each other for the whole of the walk, and Gimli in turn has been content to hang back and watch them, both alive and wholly, entirely unaware of how remarkable that was.

  


“What’s stewing in your brain, then?” Kili says at last, nudging him out of his haze with the weaponised point of his elbow. “You’ve been eerily silent, I’ve never known you not to have an opinion.”

  


“Oh, let him keep his secrets, he’s trying to be knowing and enigmatic! Did you not see the little smirk?”

  


Gimli feigns offence, hand to his chest and mouth open. “I’ll have you know there’s no trying about it, I’m genuinely knowing and enigmatic, and I always have been. No, there’s nothing brewing, I was merely thinking how much I need some more tattoos.”

  


That's not a lie-- he really is discomfited by the sight of his bare forearms, no marks of mastery or records of battles or poor drunken decisions written there in blue. It's almost worse than the feeling of his beard, still bereft of grey and too short to braid. It was well-played, though, because the two of them immediately descend into an argument about what ridiculous thing he should choose, and let him go back to watching them in peace as they fight over whether a penguin or a chicken is funniest.

  


They sidle into the training halls-- and no-one could sidle like Fili and Kili, though Gimli lacked their expertise-- late, and Gimli has to fight to keep his chin up and stop himself from flushing at the way Dwalin glared. He’d never once been late for training the first time around, and he rather thinks he’d earned it this time.

  


Training slid on as it had before, when he'd been on the cusp of his mastery the first time and was mostly idling out of fear; he jokes a little awkwardly but sincerely with the rabble who had been his friends, and in drills he's mostly able to keep his head and teach Fili a little about protecting his right leg. It feels a little like a wall of glass is between him and the rest of the room, as though his friends are almost strangers and he is untouchable, like all of it is more memory than truth.

  


The hazy strangeness of it, easy and familiar and yet so strange, is broken when Dwalin whistles a sharp note from across the room. He stands in the long stretches of sand that they used for serious sparring, where the white gravel is flecked with blood-brown, and waves curtly to the other side of the space.

  


"Gimli," he says, and it is not a request.

  


Kili makes a face of exaggerated fear at him, and Gimli shrugs and extricates himself, walks over.

  


"Sparring?" he asks, and then realises there probably should have been a 'Sir' in there somewhere when Dwalin frowns at him.

  


(Most of his expressions are frowns, and there is a very specific frown that he uses to express 'something is wrong and I'm not sure what.' It's one of his rarer ones, though Gimli remembers it becoming more frequent as he grows older and the world grows stranger.)

  


"You're unfocused," Dwalin says, voice low so that it doesn't carry. "Thought this might fix that."

  


"Wise," Gimli says with an absent grin as he steps back, still aware of how his centre of gravity is wrong, how his grip is weaker than he remembers. The glass screen is still there, he notes, present still in the way he is out of phase with the stone under his feet.

  


They circle for several long moments, the students abandoning their jests to watch, and Gimli is still smiling and calm as he dances forward, moving into distance for just long enough to push Dwalin back. This, too, is familiar and strange at once, and when Dwalin retaliates all Gimli does is move with him, making no real attempt to attack.

  


They had done this many times, in Erebor as equals, and he knows the back-and-forth well enough to act on autopilot. His heart is slow, his movements quick and practised but not sharp with battle-- until he leans too far forward, overcompensating for his balance, and pain bites across his cheek, razor-cold and hot with blood.

  


The glass shatters.

  
He strikes out, and is rebuffed, returning and returning, sliding seamlessly onto the offensive. He can see when Dwalin wakes up, too, and suddenly there's a gleeful ferocity that seems to have no source. He cuts at guards and pushes the distance, inching forward bit by bit, until he is ducking back from a swipe at his helmeted skull and tossing his axe from his left hand to his right, flipping his grip and slicing up--

  


Gimli breathes for a moment, and then raises an eyebrow. His axe is still, resting with only the shadow of pressure against the underside of Dwalin’s right arm, the arteries and nerves, unarmoured. Dwalin does not concede-- that is to say, he does not say that he concedes, but he nods and steps away, which is as much of an admission of defeat as he’s ever received. He turns back to his friends, and the sparkling shards of glass begin to reform as his pulse slows.

  


A hand clasps itself onto his shoulder; Dwalin looks at him the same way he had after the debacle with the Achilles tendon, somewhere between confused and angry because he's confused. They wait like that until Dwalin jerks his head, and Gimli waves off his friends.

  


"The Princess had a word with me yesterday evening," Dwalin says, hushed so that the students only now re-forming their drilling lines don't hear, and Gimli fights not to swallow nervously.

  


"Did she?" He says, and it feels inadequate.

  


Dwalin sighs, like rock moving. "You'll have a devil of a time getting it past your parents," he says at last, "But if you're seeing what she thinks you're seeing, I'll back your bid."

  


One of his thick eyebrows raises as Gimli just shakes his head in astonishment and smiles. "You have my thanks," he says. Once, this show of approval would have been worth a small kingdom to him, and he finds that even now it is warming.

  


Dwalin _harrumphs,_ in his signature way. "Well," he says, "The good news is, if you're coming, we shan't need the Wizard's fellow after all, which should cheer Thorin up no end."  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> . . . :)
> 
> poorly edited, and that's entirely my fault. feel free to shout at me about it.


	11. a change of plan

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> dwarves are cryptic at each other; legolas is cryptic at himself.

"I don't know where to go," he says at last, as he threads a long string through the eye of a needle and fixes it in the fork of a twig. It is not fine enough, perhaps, and he feels that the ink will blur, but it is better than nothing.

 

Beorn watches, expression quizzical. He's very good at it; he has the eyebrows. "Does it matter where you go?"

 

"Yes. A great deal. And also, at once, not at all."

 

Clouds race past the thick glass windows, and Legolas smiles as he sees the first thin thread of blue in some time. 

 

"Well," Beorn rumbles, pouring an excess of honey into his tea, "Where were you headed before, when you left the forest?"

 

"Under the mountains."

 

He runs the needle through an orange candle-flame as he thinks, and continues, setting it at last to the skin of his calf. 

 

"There is a wretched thing, and it guards a thing perhaps more wretched, but I-- It lives in the deep tunnels, below the Goblin-Town, and I would not know how to find it. I might search in vain until the Second Song, and even if I found it, I would not wish to lay my hands upon the thing that it carries."

 

"You evidently have a grand and mysterious goal," Beorn says, amused, "And for all that I am curious I shall not make you tell me, but I ask you if you intend to go alone."

 

Legolas laughs dryly, wincing at the push of the needle but pleased by the dark lines forming. "I don't believe that I could do this alone if I tried."

 

"Then ask for aid."

 

The last warm light of the evening shifts, and comes red and liquid and falling in stripes through the clouds; Legolas turns his face into it and smiles. "You make it sound very simple."

 

"I am a simple man."

 

"I hope that you never have the occasion to change that."

 

//

 

Such is it that when he sets out in the morning, ice upon the grass, he goes towards the mountain in deep thought. Caradhas climbs towards the white sky before him, crowned in fragments of shining mist, grey and cold and lifeless. He has learned over long years to see the beauty in stone, but the charcoal streaks of black rock and the distant smell of ice is still forbidding, eerie even in its beauty. He recalls running over the snow, calling out into the gathering blizzard and pretending as though the cold was not beginning to linger in his bones; he stands in full sun and looks over the Misty Mountains and shivers.

 

An omen, he thinks absently, and sighs. Turns South.  

 

//

 

The King scowls. Luckily for Gimli, he's been scowled at by so many members of the Line of Durin by now that he's almost totally immune, and is able to save all of his quailing for the Lady Dis.

 

She grunts as she hefts the bar back onto the rack, and then  _ she _ scowls at him. He rallies, but only just. 

 

"Uh." He says, and then winces. "Events have gone a tad . . . sideways."

 

"Speak plain."

 

". . . Unanticipated and urgent change of plans."

 

Oakenshield drops his hands from the bar, and crosses his arms across his chest, forbidding. "That's not plain, lad."

 

Dis looks at him with the eyes of a watchful bird for a long moment as the noises of the Halls of Iron echo around them. The air tastes of chalk, and there is a streak across her forehead, trailing into the silver of her hair.

 

"Thorin," she says at last, "Leave."

 

His mouth hinges open for half a second before it snaps shut with an audible noise, and Gimli blinks. "I'm watching the bar," he says uselessly, and then relents into the safe territory of the scowl.

 

"Gloinul can watch the bar."

 

Thorin intensifies his scowl, but steps back and walks off into the Halls with a stiff back. Gimli watches him, and realises absently that he's doing so with a sort of historical interest, the same way he would watch Dain the First or Narvi the Smith were he to encounter them. 

 

She looks back at him, settling on the bench and jerking her head until he comes to watch the bar. It's an impressive weight, and she makes an amusing snarl as it moves towards her chest and back. 

 

"What happened," she says, biting out the words between repetitions.

 

"Had a word with Dwalin," he stalls, and she raises an upside-down eyebrow. "He seems to think that, well, if I'm invited, Mr.-- The Burglar shan't come."

 

"Is there a rogue type invited?"

 

"Not quite. The Wizard is choosing a candidate, for the lucky number, except that apparently now the lucky number is me."

 

"Ah." She levers upright, and slides some more iron onto the ends of the bar. "Jolly good, then."

 

He blinks at her.

 

"This is a Dwarven expedition," she says, long-suffering. "It has a Dwarven goal. The Grey Wizard has done much for us, but he has no right to interfere. Let us choose our own people. We have never needed outside help."

 

_ We have never needed-- _ He bites down on his anger, breathes out slowly through his teeth.

 

"I disagree."

 

"You disagree with me, Gloin's son?"

 

"I do. Erebor is ours, sure as stone, but we can't eat gold."

 

She laughs once, shortly, astonished, and then again more honestly. "Of course we need trade," she says, "Of course we rely on others, same as everyone from here to Mandos. No-one here'd tell you any different. Doesn't mean we should let Gandalf and his ilk make decisions that are our right."

 

He carefully puts the bar to rest before he responds, knuckles white. "I mean no offence," he says low, "But-- Princess-- you are old. The Dwarves of Ered Luin have heard a lot of hostility and not a lot of help from outside the mountains in recent decades. When you speak words of independence, the Dwarrow I train with hear of isolation."

 

It's true. It was true once, and it was true long after they won back the Mountain. He'd spent long hours in thought, those few hours of peace he won as Lord of Aglarond, of why he'd had a spiked defence as a younger Dwarf, why he had seen the possibility of relying upon others as a threat. Never one word alone, he'd realised, but words just vague enough, equivocation from those he'd trusted and always, always, the promise of independence. It'd taken root in him, and in his memories he'd seen how it took root in the other cadets, how it'd slowly grown through the city like a strangling vine.

 

_ He _ was old, now. He'd said she was old, and it was the first real lie he'd told her, and that was jarring, somehow.  He'd worked this all out himself when he was older than she is now, painstaking, necessary. 

 

Dis snatches the bar back, startling, and drops it almost too low before pushing it back up again, the sort of sudden movement that belies an unwelcome thought.

 

"Sorry," Gimli adds, too late.

 

"Do we  _ need _ the wizard's fellow," she says, without the rising tone of a question. "Do you need him to keep my sons alive."

 

He feels ill, he realises absently. Nauseous. Slightly terrified of the way that the things he knows are falling out from under his feet. 

 

"My Lady Dis, everything that I know and that I have seen tells me that if we do not have the Burglar, we will not have Erebor."

 

He has not answered her question and he knows it.

 

She looks straight at the ceiling, still flat on the bench, and laughs again, short and mirthless. Chalk falls from her hands and stains her dark surcoat. "An ambassador tendered his retirement last Highday," she says slowly, weighing her words. "It has just occurred to me that with Thorin in the Rhovanion, I will need a diplomat there to handle . . . the logistics that he is not so skilled at it."

 

Gimli hums. "Such an ambassador would need to arrive as they do, possibly before, and would of course not be a member of the Company," he plays along.

 

"Conflict of interest, exactly. It's such a shame, Gimli son of Gloin, that blue does not suit you."

 

He stops, and winces. "Durin Blues? No, they suit me very ill-- in shade, but not in implication."

 

"Well said. I have been very impressed, you know--" and her voice is low, suddenly, sweeter than usual, coaxing-- "You have the sort of maturity I watch for very carefully."

 

He feels his eyes go cold, his shoulders go stiff. "Do not make me the offer you made Gonli. I would not accept it, and I know what would happen then. Best to save the trouble."

 

The honey-false voice drops away, and she stands slowly, languid again, with her arms crossed across her broad chest. "You stand differently," she says shortly. "You speak differently. I dislike not knowing."

 

He blinks slowly, to gather his thoughts, and knows that even that is suspicious. "Your husband died. When I was twenty." 

 

He regrets saying it immediately, but she makes no change, so still in expression and posture that he knows she is feeling something unwelcome.

 

"I did."

 

"You went on. He was your One, and you went on, because there were things this side of the Halls of Waiting to go on for."

 

"I did."

 

"So. So did I. I have these dreams," he says, and now that the words are here they refuse to stop coming, "I have these dreams, where he's going out onto the water, and the fire is blooming, over and over again, and we are drifting West, together, and I know that I will burn too. I have them all the time. But I never did it. I had things to do. I walk differently, now. I speak differently. So did you."

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ok some notes  
> \- blue clothes, especially bright blue-and-silver formal Line-Of-Durin robes, make Gimli look like a tomato. he knows this.  
> \- thorin doesn't allow himself Emotions so he spends time with his sister and chills while pretending he's just spotting her because otherwise she'd bench-press herself to death  
> \- dis is jacked because i'm a lesbian and i'm being self indulgent  
> \- Surprise! Some Of It Was All A Dream.  
> \- what's up with Dis and Gonli? good question.


	12. to be under the sky

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in which the author tries their hand at travel writing, and is sad about the fate of the elves.

"I'm not hurt, you know."

 

"What?"

 

Gimli looks at her as though he'd forgotten she was there, and blinks, pushing his hair out of his eyes. He wears it different, now, loose and almost regal, but it doesn't quite suit his still-round face. (It would look better with a beard, perhaps. He would be surpassing handsome, she thinks, were he not a little older, a little more solid in his own skin.)

 

"You've been haunting the city in a thunder-cloud mood since you tripped me up in training, and I though you might be—well. Guilty. I don't know, Gloinul. You're strange."

 

He laughs, sudden and bright. "Think nothing of it, Vanya. Where I am strange it is all my own work. I was merely reckless, but I lose little sleep over it."

 

Their band of demon-friends, in the centre of the room, laugh as one, though she misses the joke. The drinking-hall is overwhelmingly loud, and Gimli has, uncharacteristically, found the only quiet alcove in the building; he watches, now, all the time, with large sad eyes, and isn't dancing.

 

She tilts her head to the side and regards him coolly in the hopes that he will fill the silence of his own accord. He does not. Kili and Fili come past like a herd of oliphants, shaking the floorboards as they swap partners and set the beat.

 

"How did you do it?" She says at last. "I tried, later, to see how it was done, with my brothers, but they couldn't pin me. Where did you learn?"

 

"Ah! Trade secret, I'm afraid."

 

"Now that you have your mastery you are too good for your old friends, huh? I see how it is."

 

She jokes, but she is half-afraid it might be true. There is something prideful in the way he holds himself. He laughs again, though, almost genuine this time.

 

"Does it count as a mastery if I only beat him because he wasn't expecting it?"

 

"Dwalin would tell you that that's the best way to win."

 

He sobers, and his face falls into something serious. "I jest, my friend, but it is not vanity that holds me distant. I am preoccupied with much. As for pinning someone under their own shield, the trick is all in leverage. Like negotiation."

 

"Here is a negotiation, then—I should give you your mastery tattoo for free if you would find your way to teaching me the trick." She takes care to flex her bare forearms, so as to make her delicate ink-work flicker in the lamplight. "And if you might tell me a little of what weighs you down, and if you might unbend your spine enough to dance tonight."

 

"You drive a hard bargain!"

 

"You know well I could charge more, but I worry for you."

 

He sighs, and drums his fingers on the table. "All right. I'll take your prices."

 

She beams, and he smiles back, the first piece of honest joy she's seen from him in almost a week. It's incandescent, and for a moment she is overwhelmed by the sort of molten affection for her friends that takes her from time to time. "Come on up, then," she says to cover it. "The band is terrible, but when have you cared?"

 

When the next circle forms, Gimli stands up for it. Vanya simmers, smug, in her achievement, but not for long, because Gimli's mad sister pulls her off her feet and into the stomping. They turn a dizzy circle—Camlin is evidently more practised at sideways leaps than she is—before she draws her close. "Did he tell you what was wrong?" she hisses.

 

"Not yet, but I've extracted a promise."

 

"Finally," Camlin sighs.

 

Has she always had hair quite that red? It's remarkable. There's so much of it, curling over her cheeks in some very impressive braids.

 

"I shan't tell you, though, I'm afraid, unless he wants it shared."

 

"Ah. A respectable position." Camlin shoves her forward suddenly, and Vanya almost tackles her before she realises she's being dipped as the music calls for. "Didn't you beat him up a couple months ago?"

 

"I did. He needs that, every so often."

 

The music slows and leads into a less athletic tune, but they stay on the floor. Camlin smiles, at last, and she has the same bright, open face as her brother, now that she's not attempting to engage in subterfuge. "I think I'd quite like to know you a little better, Vanya of the Blacklocks," she says slowly.

 

Vanya goes red, and steps closer than is perhaps appropriate for the dance.

 

//

 

"So what does it actually say?"

 

Gimli tears his attention from the landscape carved on the wall and regrets it immediately. The sting across his ribs he's been successfully ignoring burns back to life. "It's Tengwar," he says, as Vanya applies herself again to the task of causing him pain. "Sindarin. Means 'nine,' if you'd really like to know."

 

She pauses in her work for a moment, and makes an expression that he can't quite parse. "Why did you ask for an elf-number for your mastery tattoo? I'm less complaining than confused, if you catch my drift."

 

He shrugs expansively and pretends valiantly that it didn't hurt. "I'm mysterious and enigmatic, you know. I do strange things with no explanation."

 

She punches him in the shoulder, and he does what he can not to double over with laughter. Old friends are old friends, he supposes, even a century or two removed.

 

". . . You made me a promise, do you recall?" she hints badly, voice low.

 

"I did." He hums a little, and continues, "You wanted to know what has me so preoccupied that I am neglecting our mutual friends."

 

"I'm not the only one."

 

"Well. Here is a little of it: I'm leaving tomorrow, and I may not be back for some time."

 

She sets the needle aside and swallows. "This is your home as much as it is mine."

 

Oh, it aches that she's wrong.

 

"Regardless, there are things I must do."

 

"What would require you to leave before even your majority? On such notice?"

 

He pulls a scrap of silk from his pocket, the only concession he's made to the tradition of the Durin Blues, and she stares him down. "You're an awful diplomat. You hate it. You've never won a game of poker in your life."

 

"I'll learn. I might not like it, but there are things more important than what I like."

 

With a sigh, she returns the needle to the string. "You must make me one more concession."

 

"Name your price."

 

"I wish to see you off. The rest of us as well. We'll have a proper going-away party."

 

He swallows, and feels the blood leach from his skin. He concedes.

 

//

 

These friends he barely remembers—these friends who know him far too well—he's not sure that he can bear it another day, in this quiet city, full to the brim with poverty and the sort of history that bites if you touch it. The mark of his mastery is back on his skin; by old tradition, older than the counting of years, he belongs to himself now, and no-one else. He leaves in the night, and feels like some sort of escaping criminal.

 

For all that first day, he keeps his eyes half-closed against the sudden, shocking brightness of the sun. How strange it is, sometimes, to be under the sky. Though he is used to travel by now, there are still moments when he looks up and is sure that he is falling, that sooner or later they will all fly right off the earth with no stone above them.

 

The gait of his horse helps not at all—she is no Arod, though he had swapped his statue for her, and she bounces something awful. Too tall, and too clumsy, and there is something very strange about riding a horse alone, with no elf to steer and sing all the way. He has never seen the Grey Mountains from this high, and never alone, and he finds that he would rather not, if possible.

 

(It amuses him, a little, how the Dwarves of Ered Luin have traded so little with Men that they think a horse for a picture of one to be a good trade.)

 

The ice is still thick on the peaks, thawing with the spring and running in dancing streams down to the sea. A salmon comes leaping as he rides past, and the wind is cold and bracing on his face, and for all his melancholy he cannot muster a real bad mood. It is silent, save the wind, and he is alone, save all the little growing things and dancing fish. Peaceful with an ice-edge of danger, like walking through the Aglarond at night, like the depths of Fangorn where the vines watched as he slept, and Legolas had watched them right back—like home, he thinks, and stops his thought in its tracks as he winds down the zig-zag paths. He has no home to speak of, now; Ered Luin he had left centuries ago, Erebor is burned hollow and bitter, and he cannot speak of Aglarond, can barely think of it. Best, perhaps, to put that thought aside and hope it strangled itself like it was presently trying to strangle him.

 

It is hard to find his way on the surface, as it always is, but he has learned enough of listening to the stone to follow it down East into the foothills. The cold wind no longer smells of ice, but instead of the sea, bright and lonely; he swears he can see the coast from the mountains still, a blue shadow, and over the days it takes him to descend to sea-level he begins to understand why Legolas had spoken of it with such longing. It tugs at the centre of him, memories of a silver-wood boat and where they had planned to go. Then, of course, the gulls return, and he thinks he might see if he can't catch them with a throwing-axe, so awful is the noise they make.

 

Mithlond is . . . Not as he had long imagined it. There are the boats, yes, and the white towers, and the mouth of the Lhûn wide and dark as the sea, but the Elves are different, now. The ones that walk past him, glowing in the evening still, are carefree with the forced ease he has come to expect, and they are drunk and joyful, but it is sincere. They know of him not, and though they laugh at a Dwarf taking the crossing they do not shy away from him. Fear had came upon them all, in the last days, when the sea-longing was a fish-hook and not a lure, and not even Legolas was free of it. It is like seeing a friend restored after a long and wasting illness, the sight of the Grey Havens with joy to it still.

 

He finds passage across the Gulf easy enough, sitting in the prow of the ferry-boat and looking out towards the Blessed Isle, and there is, for a moment, a fish-hook of longing in his own flesh when he steps onto the pier. He rides on towards the Tower Hills with a heavy heart.

 

In the early spring they are a green so pale as to be silver, hung with mist in the morning and picture-book bright in the afternoon; gulls cry overhead, and then as he leaves the coast behind, ravens. The dark trees of the mountains are upon these hills still, sentries of the gloaming. The Shire is a long ride in the cold. When he sleeps in the Hills he does so fitfully and with his axe in reach.

 

Every so often, there is an ancient mile-marker rising out of the hills like a tombstone, and once, in the distance, shining with dew, the dark entrance to a burial site. Long dead kings, he thinks, crowned and cloaked with gold. He steers clear.

 

Flowers seem to bloom, all at once, as he rides. Suddenly there are beds of bluebells in the shade and shocks of white cow-parsley by the road-side; there is nothing so telling of the presence of Hobbits as the presence of flowers that are very, very carefully planted to look totally natural.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Now With Lesbians!
> 
> also: the 'nine' tattoo inspired by real life. cast of the movies got them. fun fact.


	13. lure

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the author resurrects some previously-defeated monsters; Gimli, in what is rapidly becoming a pattern, has a bad time.
> 
> warning for. uh. real bad cliffhanger

Hobbiton is barely changed. The machinery in the fields is less advanced, and the individual faces are new, but the families and the houses seem to have barely shifted. The Highday market is bright and busy, draped in yellow and green fabrics and overflowing with the first fruits of spring. Children run screaming through the square, grass-stained and beaming.

 

There is no plaque commemorating the Scouring. Somehow, this feels like the way it ought to be.

 

He finds a spare bench and weathers the curious glaces and subtle muttering, sits and watches the white apple-blossom fall. Bag End must be somewhere West; Merry and Pippin's homes—what were once their homes, and are now their fathers and their grandfathers homes—are further, a day's ride at best. Yes, he can see how his friends were made how they were. Like a vine on a cave-wall grows to fit the stone, Hobbits grow to fit the Shire and its green farthings. He'd thought so when he'd first visited, to see Sam into office, and he thinks it still now.

 

Ah. There it is, sprawled under the hill above the market, a cherry tree growing out of its chimney, languid with easy wealth and painstaking care. Not West—no, he realises, Bag End is in pride of place, and the blond Hobbit with his feet up on the fence, well, he must be Bilbo Baggins.

 

The Bilbo Baggins in his memory is some combination of the one in the stories his father told and the one he had seen, white-haired with shaking hands, at the Council; the Bilbo Baggins in his memory does not open one eye, lazy like a snake, and smile at him with his own diplomat's smile. The Bilbo Baggins in the here-and-now gives him an unexpected wave, clearly having noticed his attention, and Gimli returns it for lack of alternative options.

 

There is no point wishing for this to not be happening but Gimli does regardless as he follows the mechanised rails of politeness and walks across the square.

 

He is a comfortably round Hobbit in his equally comfortable middle age, and as Gimli approaches his fence he straightens himself and says, "Do the Dwarves have some interest in Bag End that I haven't been informed of? You've been staring for some time, you know."

 

"My apologies, Master Baggins. If any Dwarves have designs on your smial, I'm unaware of it."

 

Bilbo raises an eyebrow, almost sardonic but masked under a thick layer of politeness. "If you say so, Sir."

 

He keeps speaking, but it blurs into background noise as Gimli hears among the din of the market a very distinctive heckle. He twitches a little, and carefully does not turn around as Gandalf joyfully harangues a pipeweed trader under the guise of being deaf. "I'm very sorry," he says, a little desperate, "But this is the sixth, isn't it? Of April?"

 

Bilbo stares him down squarely for several moments too long. "It is."

 

"He's—He's too early, he can't be here yet—listen, Master Baggins, it is in your best interests, and the best interests of many other people, that you find yourself on a long walk this afternoon, and possibly tomorrow as well."

 

Bilbo crosses his arms across his chest and puffs up like an indignant cat. "Are you threatening me, sir?" he says, with the sort of 'sir' that one sometimes hears from someone rich enough to believe that they are the only 'sir' in anyone's vicinity. It's wholly false. Mister Baggins is trying it admirably hard, but it's pyrite.

 

Gimli meets his eyes, and he deflates.

 

"Well then. Perhaps you'd best come with me."

 

//

The buildings on the outskirts of Hobbiton are rather unlike those in the middle, standing atop the grass instead of under it, and are rather poorly planned. As a child, Bilbo had played extended games of Hide-and-Ambush in the warrens of alleys and back-barns behind the shops, and it is into this maze that he guides the strange Dwarf. He'd said to hide out, and indeed had tied up his horse so that he could disappear, and so hiding they were.

 

He whirls on his heels and faces him, hands on his hips, and a righteous indignance bubbles in his chest. "Well, Master Dwarf? Are you twitter-pated? Do you think yourself safe now?"

 

The Dwarf—who, he now sees, is barely an adult, which makes him wince internally—blinks. "Um," he says, and Bilbo sighs.

 

"Who was it who was following you?"

 

"Nobody, as far as I'm aware. The situation is rather complex, but there was—someone who would rather I not be doing what I am doing, and who has . . . To be in a certain place in about twenty days, and should not be here."

 

It is evidently Bilbo's turn to make silly faces and say "Um." Despite his denial, it still seems most probable that the—he cannot think of him as anything more than a boy, truly, with how his beard is still thin and his hair fluffing into a red cloud around his too-sincere face—that the boy is being tailed by something nefarious. Novel-plots race in his head, and he tries to write himself out of the story.

 

". . . There is a rather nice walking route over the nearer side of the West Farthing, you know. If, as you say, you would like to disappear."

 

"No, its—I shall continue, I think."

 

"Might it not be safe here for you?"

 

"Perhaps not."

 

The Dwarf is a poor liar; he chews at his lip, and his face goes red from the nose outwards, and his eyes dart left to right like a nervous mouse. The part of Bilbo that has always been rather too susceptible to a faunt's wide eyes goes squishy. "Is there anything I can provide? Do you need supplies, or a route?"

 

"Actually," the Dwarf says, with the expression of someone struck by a strange but compelling impulse, "There might be something I can give you."

 

He reaches into his pockets with a bright, nervous smile, and takes out a little wrapped parcel, tied with string. "You would call this a mathom, I think—something pretty but useless, with a little too much history to be peaceful."

 

"Whatever do you mean?"

 

"Just . . . Here you go, Mister Baggins. Perhaps it's my birthday, so here is a present. Keep it on your mantelpiece, if you like. I made it myself."

 

With another smile, he gives a precise salute, walking backwards for a moment and then taking to his heels before Bilbo can call after him and inquire as to his name, or, more likely, where on Earth he learned Bilbo's— but he is gone.

 

Bilbo does take that walk along the West Farthing after all, and on a bench he unwraps a shimmering statuette of some coiled snake, winged, its mouth open in a wicked lunge. It is finely detailed, remarkably beautiful, fanciful like a dream and entirely, entirely useless.

 

When he drifts home in the late evening, it is to the discovery that Hamfast spent the day telling tales on him to a visiting meddlesome wizard, and has not mulched the potato patch.

 

//

 

Gimli cuts his horse free rather than wasting time untying her and kicks her into a gallop, scanning the square for any returning grey hats. His stomach is a black pit of confusion, and he's still got no idea what possessed him to make a present of the dragon. Perhaps it is because the dragon he had carved belongs to a story, to a quest he sings about, not something still living. Perhaps he does not wish to carry the fiction of Smaug while the truth of him sleeps over what was once his home.

 

He finds his hand straying to the carved doors of Khazad-Dum, heavier than their size would suggest, in his breast pocket, and recognises a mannerism forming. Perhaps— though they are still on the face of the mountain, still shining in the moonlight— Khazad-Dum is much of the same. The friendship between the Dwarves and the Elves that formed them is now an impolite fiction, and he cannot hope for it.

 

The Shire speeds past him as the horse accelerates, tossing her head, and he holds on a little desperately. His hair whips past his head in flurries. Green banks of grass grow over the roads, green doors and silver willows; the flowers are still here, everywhere, spilling purple and blue over the Earth. Once— Once, in Ithilien in the early spring, when the sky was blue and the stone had been steady under his feet, he had braided for Legolas a crown of these same crocuses, and had very carefully not thought of how the flowers were brighter than jewels, but only when Legolas was wearing them. He thinks of it now.

 

He thinks of it as he rides out of Hobbiton, and he thinks of it with such intensity that when the path grows faint and the hills rise about him he looses the trail.

 

He daren't turn back, when he realises. There is too much risk in facing a Maiar, knowing what he knows, more risk than the wilds here can hold. He is a warrior, a warrior of Erebor and a famed hero, and he has held onto that throughout everything.

 

A raven watches from a hanging bough. It stares from one dark eye, and does not move.

 

Night is drawing on, inexorable; the stars are visible even now, though the sky is still pale, and Gimli tries to orient himself by them, but they are too distant and crowded to find his way. He is changing the stories that he once sung. The fact of it ambushes him, like Orcs over a deep valley. The people he once knew are changing around him, because of him, and the places they will go and the stories they will tell to their children are different, because Gimli has been trying his hand at the Valar's job.

 

The mist is cold, and falls like rain onto his face. He's lost the path, and a fog is rising in his mind and all about him. A tree, stripped of its leaves, lies fallen over a hill. Though he leads his horse with all the skill he can pretend he has, the bramble and gorse rises thick and biting, and he finds himself turning North against his will.

 

The fog is white, now, thick, and the mountains on the horizon are lost to him. A raven caws, once, and it echoes for all that it shouldn't.

 

He hears his father's voice, calling out. It is broken and desperate and he turns towards it without input from his mind as it calls his name again—and it stops, mid-syllable.

 

"Adad!" He shouts into the empty hills as the wind rises.

 

There is no reply. His own voice returns to him, sounding just as desperate as his father's had, almost too clear for an echo. The horse shivers under him, dancing forward and breathing out thick clouds of steam. Her eyes are bloodshot and rolling.

 

Out from the dark around the curve of a distant hillock comes another scream, and this time—he has not the familiarity to be certain, but he thinks—he thinks that it is Fili. Have they followed him? Did he leave too fast, too abrupt—did they worry for him? Is it all changing around him? There is the vertigo feeling of standing in a mine-shaft as the floor caves in, like falling in every direction at once.

 

He follows the voice, deeper into the shadow under the hills, and the wide mist crowds closer. It coils like a constricting snake, and he breathes shallowly. He has no helmet. He has flimsy cadet's armour and a training weapon. He is a warrior of Erebor and a famed hero, but he is still in a cadet's armour.

 

It screams again. There is no doubt, this time. The voice is Sam's. Samwise Gamgee's voice calls out to him from the next curve of the valley, and when he stops still in his tracks, so does Aragorn's, and then his Amad's.

 

This is no search party. This is— he remembers stories, fanciful ghost-stories, of long-dead kings, crowned and cloaked with gold— this is something sinister, pulling his friends from his memories and pouring their fear into the air as a lure.

 

White draws in around him. The fog is not in the air but under his eyelids, and something that should be a shadow moves behind a standing stone. His horse shivers, and then as Gimli's fingers loosen on the reigns under no command from him she rears.

 

He falls, and lands heavily on the dirt with no control of his limbs. Before it reaches him he sees, in the centre of his vision that is not lost, a single star, distant and pale but still shining.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> . . . sorry?


	14. the reflection of a stranger, crowned in gold

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> lorien!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i . . . apologise for this 4k behemoth of a chapter. it wanted to be told such, and i wrote it all between the hours of eleven pm and one am last night. ask me not how.

_To the Staff of Lord Elrond of Rivendell—_

  
_I apologise for the unsolicited missive, but my need is great. My name is Tauriel. I am a Captain of the Great Greenwood's patrol guards, and in wartime a Captain too. I write in aid of a subordinate, a friend, and our prince._

  
_Legolas, who is a scout in my patrol unit and the son of the King, and one whom I am proud that I can call my friend, fell unexpectedly ill some days ago. By the time this reaches Rivendell, it will likely have been some weeks. We have competent healers here, and I am sure that given time we could cure him of this ailment— he grew weak, and bled without explanation, within hours, and spoke delirious nonsense as though he had been concussed, and forgot simple things, and grew confused. The King reported that he spoke of Valar and Maiar and magic in some haze, and left him a letter of a most concerning tone._

  
_He left the letter because, against the requests of his healers and his friends, he left the kingdom in the early hours of the night, not a day since his illness came on, in the midst of the spring festival. The mechanisms of his exit are unknown, but he was seen in the Laketown by some reports. Since then, however, he was seen to have crossed the Anduin and veered towards the mountains; the birds and beasts that watch the forest saw him advance upon the High Pass in some intent, though many will not accept their testimony. We fear for him. I fear for him._

  
_My lieutenant, Ororin, a healer and alchemist of some repute, is convinced he has been called East by some power, and goes even now towards Amon Lanc and then on towards the east to find some sign of him, but Ororin is fearful and quick to suspicion. I fear that we cannot blame this on the actions of an Enemy, but only on an injured elf and the workings of his own mind. The King disagrees, and prepares strange plans. He grows superstitious, and watches the stars with an eye for ill tidings._

  
_I think that Legolas has gone over the Misty Mountains for some purpose all his own. It is not unreasonable to think that he would need to shelter in Rivendell. It is my hope, then, that he will find Imladris welcoming as it always has been, and that— if he is found— word will be sent back to his friends and family, and, if possible, he may be brought home. If left alone in the wilderness, with his own dreaming mind to command him and his own dream-monsters, insubstantial, to battle, he may soon find himself in peril, and we may never know of his fate._

  
_The kingdom draws itself ever closer within its walls without him. The King would risk life and limb for his safety, and the lines of the personal and the political are thin here; war is not impossible._

  
_If Legolas cannot be found, we may need the counsel of Elrond to stop ourselves from poisoning ourselves and the forest with our own dark thoughts._

  
_But I did not write this. Do not, please, mention my name._

  
_Yours, in hope,_

  
_Tauriel of the Greenwood._

 

Tauriel signs her name with the careful precision of someone who has never had much call to write formal letters. She worries over the phrasing, in terror of accidentally calling some Lord or another something awful— she has read too much of the goings-on of courts, and heard Legolas complain too much of the workings of his own, to press the wax seal closed with anything other than fear.

  
The hall is empty, now. Her comrades are scattered to the winds, and the saloons in which they were accustomed to resting their minds after a patrol or a training-brawl are worse for it, quiet and without life.

  
She is afraid that they will always be such, now. Hope wound itself into the ink as she wrote, and now that it is dry and fixed to the page, there is none left in her. She sends her hope away, over the mountains, and now she is a little empty, too.

 

//

  
Lorien is visible from a great distance, the first dark edges of the forest proper rising from the valley like a great green cloud drifting over the world. Legolas spurs his horse towards it, and finds that he does not like to do so without a Dwarf at his back, humming with the hope of seeing the Lady Galadriel again— though they had not made the journey often, and never since she sailed. They had spoken of it, idly, of the beauty of that land, but Gimli had begun to creak and all accounts said that it was diminishing rapidly without her magic.

  
So they had stayed in their own lands, as the shadows lengthened over the age of Elves, and out of fear of what he would see he did not look.

  
It is yet beautiful, now. The beech trees glow pale greens and yellows as they grow new leaves for the spring, and even the few bare trees are delicate rather than desolate. The wind whispers through the sky as though humming a harmony to a song he cannot hear.

  
There is no guard to meet him. He rides to the tree-line without interruption, and though he waits between the shadow and the sky for several minutes there is no patrol to tell him to watch his step. Are the Galadhrim called away? Does something ail Lorien? It worries at his nerves, but he had heard of no trouble in these years.

  
Was it all because of Gimli, then? He had never come alone, and the idea that they were so wary only because they saw a Dwarf on the horizon stung at the pride that had been so wound up in Gimli's. They could see that he was of the Greenwood from some leagues— it was not an easy thing to conceal, with his hair dark against the wind and his green mantle— but surely that would not be enough to come forth without interruption. And yet. And yet.

  
He rides onward, and the mallorn trees rise about him. Their roots wind together and climb upright like mangroves, and it is strange to him how quickly the trick of steering the horse over the tangles and climbing through them himself returns to him. At his feet, the drifts of golden fallen leaves are crisp and rustle as the horse steps through them.

  
Nimrodel skips over the ground far sooner than he had thought, and he laughs aloud to hear its bright sound, dismounting and leading his horse so that he can watch it. Indeed it dashes through the forest just as beautiful and bright as he remembers, the drifts of golden leaves turning and dancing in its whirlpools, the water high with snow-melt. He stops there for some time, sitting with his bare feet in the water as though he were a Hobbit at elevensies, and becomes aware with shameful slowness of an elf standing behind him.

  
How long he has been there, Legolas cannot say, but when he turns and saw his sharp blond head under its wide grey hood he does not try to stop his smile.

  
"Haldir," he says simply. "Good morning."

  
"Is it?" Haldir replies, one eyebrow moving and nothing else. "Do I know you, Elf of the Greenwood?"

  
Legolas laughs, low, with the bright joy that came upon all who rested under the high canopy of Lorien. "You have never met me," he says, for there is little sense in lying, now. "I am merely happy to see the Forest in the spring. I have not yet had the privilege, and a privilege it is indeed."

  
"It shines in the spring, indeed."

  
"Aye, like a bright yellow diamond in full sunlight." A beam lances through the canopy as he speaks, and it looks to Legolas not like a jewel at all, but rather, with the gold and the silver, like the fire-light through Gimli's beard, in the last days when his hair was growing in silver-white at the borders of his skin. He finds, abruptly, that for a moment he can hardly breathe, but wrestles his face under control in time to smile diplomatically at Haldir and the guards behind him.

  
"I should hope that you do not ask me blind-folded," he says with false levity, "For I have heard that such is law, here, for the unknown and the unheralded, and it would be most cruel, while the sun is so joyful and the new leaves so bright."

  
"We save such things for those most unwelcome guests," says Haldir, with a similar steely tone. "Which you are not, Elf of the East, for all that you are foreign to me, and speak as if you know the land and our customs but are yet a stranger."

  
He stands, and sketches a bow, pretending that his spine is not hardened with iron. "I am Legolas, who is called Greenleaf, Thranduillion, and now I am not a stranger, for I know your name already." It has been so long, and so long in kindness, that he had forgotten how bitter the enmity had been once, that Gimli would be an unwelcome guest anywhere but the Black Gate itself.

  
"We have heard word of you," says Haldir shortly. "Why have you left your own kingdom?"

  
"Is not this beauty reason enough?"

  
"No."

  
"Then I have come seeking the counsel of your Lady, who may wish to hear what I have to say."

  
Haldir holds his eyes for a long moment, and Legolas smiles. There is, he knows, little kindness in it, little to trust. He has always been more sharp-toothed than elves of the various Courts. They fear him, sometimes, and so has habit he smiles wider than he would otherwise. It served him well as a Lord of Ithilien, when the kings of Men, changing ever, thought him a fey beast, and it serves him well here as Haldir turns away.

  
He and his silent sentinels walk slowly though the mallorn trunks, and Haldir speaks to him without looking. "You will be brought before the Lord and Lady," he says, taciturn, "But you may not like what they have to say. She gives counsel rarely, though it is much prized."

  
"I will bear it."

  
//

  
When he had first come to Lorien, and been freed of his blindness on Cerin Amroth and looked upon the forest and the city in all its splendour, he had thought only that it was beautiful. Peaceful, yes, and uncommon bright, as though the light was doubled as it passed through the canopy, but these things had seemed causes or consequences of the beauty. When a bird sang overhead, and flowers bloomed at his feet, it was all as it should be, and not a surprise at all, for Caras Galadhorn was beautiful, and who would doubt it?

  
Now it is all new to him. It is so, so beautiful, so much so that it aches in his chest, as he remembered but sweeter, but it is also strange. It is foreign to him, the way it must have seemed to his hobbits, like a verse from a great and tragic song about magics that he does not know and has never known.

  
It should not be so strange to him. He is an elf and a kinsman, and he is welcome here. It ought to be familiar, but it is not.

  
He sits upon the edge of the flet that he has been given all night, and does not slip into reverie, only looks out over the glowing stars of the high city and marvels at the change that has come across his mind. Insects rise from the river and the thick undergrowth, and glow gently, eerie in the purple dark.

  
He wishes for help. He wishes for someone to unwind the tattered threads of his mind and re-shape the tapestry.

  
Morning comes instead. It comes in colour, sweet and pale and jewel-bright, and the light falls across the city and the forest in lines like strokes of paint, tumbling over the high walls of the valley. Like a reflex, a safe thing to cling to, he cuts arrow-stems from the wood that the trees have shed, but Gimli is not there to forge their heads.

  
When the shadows are short and the valley is lit up as if by a candle hanging from every leaf, a courtier calls him down, glowing in the light in her white tunic. He climbs the spiralling stairs and curving pathways to the halls of the Lord and Lady with his heart in his throat, though he could not explain why if he were to be asked. The journey is one he has made before, to seek a diplomatic words while negotiating trade prices for Aglarond's fine steel, or often shortly after the war for little reason other than a banquet or a feast, and once—though he had turned away at the last moment at the doors, and had never been able to ask again—to try Celeborn's intricate lore and ask whether a Dwarf, if he sails, might be welcome in Valinor.

  
But they, too, are strange now as well as beautiful. Somehow, he sees not the wisdom he expects from an elf-lord, but something older than stone and past his comprehension. He wishes for a home that is now gone, but he does not find it. He bows as they stand for him.

  
"Welcome, Thranduil's son," the lord Celeborn says, somber, but with his head tilted to the side in curiosity. "We see few visitors from your corner of the North, and are glad to have you."

  
"We fear to leave the Greenwood, now," Legolas says, in honesty that he had not expected from himself. "Few venture past the borders, as few venture forth from this valley."

  
"You have come regardless," the Lady herself says, and her voice, as it always is, is low and smooth and regal beyond what the sound itself ought to produce. "And you come with your own fears, which are not for the Greenwood, or for yourself."

  
Legolas says nothing for a moment, and pushes his hair from his face. "I have come with a purpose. I seek your counsel."

  
"Why do you come to us?" Celeborn asks, still curious, smiling to lighten his words. "Your kingdom is not poor in wisdom, or in those who think themselves wise. You know us not, and we are not so well-placed to solve your troubles as someone who knows you better, though we may be happy to provide what aid we can."

  
"I have reason to trust in the wisdom and skill of your good wife, sir."

  
"You flatter me, Legolas of the Mirkwood. What is your reason?"

  
He holds her dark eyes, though they slice through him. "Long experience."

  
There comes no change across her face, but the senses that see more than what is real report to him a flicker of something like a a dream upon the edges of his mind. He holds still, and out in the city a bell begins to toll. Slowly, the presence draws back, and she blinks, once. Were she a lesser woman, he thinks, she may have gone pale, and as though she heard the thought her smile quirks.

  
She may well have, which is a sobering thought.

  
"You know more, then, of my task than many do," he says, with a levity that he can almost convince himself he feels.

  
"I do not think I know enough."

  
"You draw even with me, then. But I will tell you, for as I told you, I find myself in need of your advice, and with haste. The times of urgency draw closer even as we breathe here."

  
"Do you not have time yet for some days in peace? Not in vain will it prove that you came here seeking us, carrying your purpose like a burden, but surely you may set it aside by the river's edge and take a few breaths without the weight."

  
"I do not know that I can," Legolas says, and feels more mortal than he ever has before.

  
"Then come with me, and walk a little longer in the sun, while you still think yourself able, and tell me all that you wish to tell."

  
//

  
The evening is winding closed like a spool of thread before he comes to the ends of his tale, or what he hopes are not the ends of his tale, and he and the Lady and her understandably disbelieving husband have climbed to the top of the tower that winds itself around the tree. She says it is not an overlord's sort of tower, but he suspects that all who build towers from which to survey their dominion have a little of the same about them.

  
A wind blows from the East, cold and almost sweet in its coldness, and it folds the surface of the water as Galadriel fills her mirror—but when she leans to its surface and breathes over it, it gains the name of mirror, for it is smooth and unruffled as cool glass. As he steps closer, he fears condensation will form on it, and destroy the image.

  
She bids him closer, welcoming, and though he dreads what he will see he leans over the pedestal and sees his own face against the stars. But . . . No, it is not his face. It is very like his face, in nose and chin and dark eyes, but there are fine lines beside those eyes, and he is changed and gently scarred, and his hair is not yet quite streaked with grey but it is clear the possibility is there that one day it will be. The copy of his face smiles, and seems wise, and then a ripple with no source tumbles over the surface and the image is his own reflection again.

  
And then there are the holly trees that grew on the stone over Aglarond, and on them the dark stain of blood, with the source unknown to him, and then there is a river—the river stemming from Ithilien, white-water and skipping—and a boat upon it, silver wood like mithril in the early morning. Someone stands at the prow, oar in hand, but he is not close enough to tell if it is him.

  
He hopes it is him. He hopes it is not.

  
And then there is mist, white, thick, choking, and he feels it cold against his hands. It seems that great clouds of fog are rising from the water, out of the image. It seems that this pale hill and the stones that crown it like teeth rising towards the sky are but a hand's width from him, and he could read in and touch them.

  
A black horse rises on the crest of the hill, and its rider is in cloaked in a mantle of blue, and he looks left to right as if he is searching. He calls out into the hills, but Legolas cannot make out the words, only from the movement of his jaw and the desperation of his face that he must have said them.

  
Oh. Oh. The red upon his head is a familiar red. The set of his shoulders is all too known to him. Even the blue of his mantle— yes, he has seen that before. Gimli, young and unscarred and a diplomat, rides over this white hill with its white fog. He shouts again, and he sways in his saddle, and Legolas' heart leaps only to see him.

  
He seems to look up and see him— there is the reflection of something like a star shining in his eyes— but something other than Legolas holds his attention. Darkness curls in, a contagion of the spreading mist that rises still out of the mirror, and Gimli's eyes shutter, like a locked door.

  
The horse rears, eyes wild with terror, hooves striking clods of earth from the hill, and Gimli lets go of the reins and falls like a marionette with all the strings cut at once.

  
Liquid slides between Legolas' fingers as he realises he is gripping at his own hands so hard that his nails are drawing blood from his palms, but for all his hopes it is not so simple as a fainting spell. No, the horse bolts, and the image ripples—he could scream as the water moves—but the curling fog is not gone. Dark, then, and not the easy darkness of a new moon, or of a room at night with the curtains drawn, but the kind of darkness that closes in on all sides.

  
He hears breathing. He has never had to recognise another by their breathing before, but he does now, and Gimli's is too shallow, slow like he is in deep sleep. And then—oh, he fears, he fears for him like he has never feared for another in his life, or for himself—there is another sound.

  
It is the movement of air in lungs, yes, but he cannot call it breathing, not with the way it rasps and rattles like a dead man. Something shifts and clinks, like a suit of maille, or like jewellery, like a corpse dressed in finery for its burial. It comes closer. It comes closer.

  
Legolas cannot now keep from crying aloud. The Lady, on some other plane of existence, rests a hand on his shoulder and tries to pull him gently from the mirror, but he barely notices. He shouts Gimli's name, and it echoes in this distant and accursed place that he sees so clearly, and his heartbeat thunders in his ears.

  
That slow breathing, a poor mimic of how Gimli slept when he was at peace, rises. The sound of metal ceases, and there is, from far below him, as if through a great distance, a gasp and then a cry.

  
The surface of the mirror breaks; the wind tears at the mist as it rises over the canopy, and the water ripples in it, now just as water ought to. The stars shine again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yeah. so that happened.
> 
> catch me inventing new magic mirror powers, yo.
> 
> when gimli wants to tell someone he mighta time travelled: his siblings, who would not reveal his secrets under torture! (well, other than . . . you know, the fun secrets. siblings.)  
> when legolas wants to tell someone: Im Gonna Ride To Lorien :)


	15. where the shadows lie

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in which many liberties are taken with barrow-wight lore and tom bombadil. also, bad poetry.

Someone calls his name. Gimli snuffles, and rolls over, because he has no intention of waking up just yet, no matter what Legolas thinks is so urgent to discuss at this hour.

 

He curls tighter into his ball, and then the wandering, sleepy river of his thought ceases to flow.

 

That was Legolas' voice, there could be no doubt about it, calling his name, but Legolas is away in Eryn Lasgalen and knows him not. He des not wish to discuss the wisdom of purchasing a new white tunic when it would inevitably become a brown tunic, or present a bold new theory about crop rotations.

 

But he had heard many impossible callings, had he not? Voices had come over the hills plucked from his memory, and then the fog had risen and he had slipped from the world in a haze. He wakes up fully, then, with that awful realisation, but dares not move, locked into a facsimile of sleep in the hopes of warding off the attention of whatever has lured him into this dark space.

 

With only the sound of his own breathing in his ears, his hand inches to his waist where his knife ought to have rested. There is the sound of movement in the far distance, as though coming through several metres of rock, and then as his fingers wrap around the hilt of a stranger's sword a light rises against his eyelids. He freezes, and his own breathing ceases, and in the resulting silence he hears a single, desperate rattling breath. The fear crystalises inside of him, and there is a long moment, stretched thin like wire, where he wavers on the knife-edge between fight and flight.

 

He draws the stranger's-sword from its sheath in one smooth movement, eyes snapping open as he rolls to his feet. The rusted blade hangs still and ready in the dust-scented air; the pale blue light, unnatural, as that of shades and spirits, shines from the dirt and metal. Gold hangs from every surface that is not broken though with roots, but it is cold, grey-looking in the evil light. At one end of the long chamber, from under a boulder rolled over a dark chasm, a long arm stops in its movements.

 

Could it be called an arm, when the flesh upon it is so shrivelled, its nails more like claws, its yellow skeleton visible though its cracked skin? Golden rings, the jewels fallen from them and leaving a space like the space in the mouth where a tooth once was, clinked low like chains upon its fingers.

 

Gimli roars, half of fear and half of threat, and leaps from the cold slab. A rasping laugh answers him. Cracking, as of bones or of brittle metal, echoes in the narrow space, and the arm shoots forward. Through the black gap in the wall comes more than should fit though as a man slithered through it with the movements of a snake, collarbone shattered, rib-bones moving as they ought not to move, and Gimli hears, not through his ears but through the sense that all Dwarves have of the magnetic humming of the stone and earth, a song.

 

It uses his own heart for a drum-beat, and the voice is hopeless. The tone of it is like ice. The man before him is not a man; this ancient queen of Westernesse, golden circlet upon rotted hair, her silver maille cuisse snakelike-whispering with motion, stands now as though rusted iron did not bleed from the places upon her neck where the movement of her broken collarbone had tore the skin.

 

She is singing, and it feels as though Gimli has been hearing this song for centuries, all this life, as though it has been sung by the quartz and ferrous iron since the world was new, and he only now understanding the words. He has heard the melody before, he thinks, but he has not heard the rhyme.

 

 _"In the black wind the stars shall die, and still on gold here let them lie,"_ the spectre and her kingdom sing to him, and he knows too much of prophecy not to shake at it. But he suddenly cannot fear her. Her skull is fragile underneath her paper-brown skin; her eyes are rotted out of her head, and there is instead a pale greyish light, that same light that shines throughout the cavern, as if the metal on her fingers is now inside of her, glinting. Gold and power he has come to know, can curl inside the chest of those who seek them and beat there like a false copy of a heart.

 

Balin in his tomb was buried with his sword at his side, as should have been, and the once-glorious hall had come under the hand of a shadow that he had never had a hope of controlling. The Shadow had moved across the green barrow-downs, and the once-great Kings and Queens had never had a hope of driving it away. He wishes he could despise her, could summon the fire needed to move his shattered blade, but she sings to him of the Doom of Arda and he can only find pity.

 

The song is within him and without him, and the fragment of prophecy that is inside all the Free Peoples rears its head. He could not speak, now, without breaking the tune, so he does not. He lowers his sword.

 

 _"Night under Night is here, deep the earth-dark gloamings. Thy heart of gold, it binds thee here, among the broken things."_ The tune melts underneath his voice, though he is hardly Luthien.

 

 _"Bright are the stars above, beautiful the evening; I raise my sword against thee not, rather I would free thee."_ His voice echoes in the cavern, and it is not until the last of the reverberations fade that he realises she has stopped to listen. No humming comes from the polarised quartz.

 

Her jaw gapes open at the joins, as if to scream, snake-like. Grey light flickers over the cavern, and for a moment the gold seems like true-silver. She does not scream. Her hand—laden with gold, the bones of her fingers visible and brown with old blood—extends, hanging in the air before him, and for a moment Gimli is lost for a response.

 

But a queen is a queen, after all. There are some things that must be done. He takes the hand in his own, and it weighs almost nothing. There is no pulse. Once, without a flinch—for something other than his conscious mind, it seems, is operating his body—he lowers his lips to just above the bone-dice knuckles, as though she were the Lady Galadriel and he were a lord with tribute.

 

A queen is a queen, and she has been rotting below the ground for longer than Gimli has lived. She longs, as an abandoned friend or a broken blade does, for some sort of recognition, to be seen as she once was. And as she once was she appears to him, as if in a dream; regal, and human, and alive. Sunlight breaks through a great glass roof, and a court is hushed behind him. Silent, waiting, hoping, for her.

 

And then he is himself again. The air is growing thin for lack of oxygen. It seems as if she smiles—the leather-muscles underneath her cheekbones move, at least. Slowly, gracefully, she keels over, falling past him. A cessation of un-life, and nothing more.

 

He only blinks at her for a long moment, his breathing loud in the empty chamber. The last fragments of music die. His fingers close around something.

 

She should rest again on the altar, he thinks, not sprawled upon the floor, but she is stiff with rigor mortis when he tries to lift her, as though she has lain there on the dirt for decades, centuries. Now that there is no distraction to occupy him, he closes his eyes tight and pretends that the grey light isn't fading. He pretends he had never thought of Balin and the Hall of Mazarbul, and when he opens his eyes again he pretends that the boulder, too heavy for him to move, is not still across the exit.

 

We cannot get out, he does not say. He pretends he does not think it.

 

The prongs of a jewel-setting bite into his palm, and when he feels hot blood run down his fingers he opens his hand. A ring falls to the ground. There are many on his fingers, for he is dressed in the same corpse-white fabric and golden jewellery that cloaks and crowns all the wretched people underneath the barrows, but this one is not tarnished or nicked. The stone, he sees when he stoops to pick it up, is still perfect in its fine filigreed socket, an opal of a deep black-and-purple tone that he has never seen.

 

 _A gift,_ it whispers to him. _She gave me to thee, and I serve thee now._

 

 _I am beautiful and perfect,_ it sings, _and while thou should carry me thou shall never be wounded, for all arrows shall turn at thy skin skin and blades will shatter where they strike thee._

 

_Thou shall be young and hale forever, and never wither, thy arm shall always be strong. Never wouldst thou be mourned, and never would thou mourn another, for I shall give thee power over life and death._

 

He slides the ring over his knuckles. A voice screams a warning in the back of his mind, but the song has returned, and it drowns out all else. He turns the song against the boulder across the entrance, and it rings like the trumpets of Erebor, like the drums in the deep, inside of his mind. The stone shifts, and then a crack grows from the apex to the base and it splits in two as though it has been struck by a stone-giant.

 

"Oh," He says, as the cold fresh air moves towards him. There is a shadow across the entrance, the high rock overhanging it, but past the darkness is the night sky. Behind him the pale light flares and dies.

 

He steps past the stone doorway and into the air; it is like coming alive again. The stars seem just above his head; Durin's Crown is burning still in the northern sky, the seven stars a bright and beautiful challenge to the dark places and the evil things. Cold air stings at his skin and seeps through the thin white tunic, but it is bracing, like leaping into snow melt, how it raises the blood.

 

He had not lied. All, here, is still beautiful, and the long-dead queen has been laid to rest. There is still joy and truth in Arda, against the hopeless things; his chest is full of something bright and strange. His horse is gone, and his armour, but there is chain-mail and weaponry behind him that will not be missed, and he has walked far before without a horse.

 

And, best of all, he now has this ring, with its perfect golden setting and its royalty-purple stone . . . The things that he could do with it roll away in his head, and in his heart he is made a giant, a hero free from suffering with the stone upon his finger.

 

Then a pale beam of starlight falls from the Star of Eärendil in the West, and shatters itself in the opal. Where it glints, the metal under its light is cold and unlovely, like the gold in the barrow, like Orcrist under the glass at the tomb of King Thorin the Second. He sees, then, what he had been unable to see; the charm turns to mist in the bright evening. He turns back— on her altar, in funeral repose, there is indeed something of the Nazgûl in her regal posture, in the circlet on her forehead. The longsword beside her . . . Yes. Yes, he has seen that before.

 

Above the overhang stands a man, brightly-dressed and serious of face. There is something about him that says his anger is dangerous, that Gimli should not be seeing him with his brow furrowed. "Wither are you going, Lockbearer, Son of Gloin, over the Downs with me unknowing?"

 

Gimli opens his mouth, and cannot answer. The ring is still in his hand.

 

"I am going home," he says at length, and it is both a lie and the truth.

 

The man—is he a man? He seems to be nothing more than himself—whistles gently, as if in surprise. "The Dwarves are masters of metal, as Tom Bombadil is master of wood and water. Do you claim dominion over the gold and the bones?"

 

Gimli sighs. "No," he says, "And it will not claim dominion over me. Sir, do you have a shovel?"

 

The man—presumably Tom Bombadil, who considers himself master of wood and water—narrows his beetle-black eyes. "I go to find a shovel," he says, and suddenly—though he had not moved—he is gone, as though a shadow had passed before the moon and took him from the world.

 

The mouth of the cave is behind him like a black mine-shaft, the dead Queen upon her slab of stone. Gold glitters in the shadows, and Gimli shivers in his corpse-clothes.

 

He needs armour, and a weapon, and though it is distasteful in concept he walks back into the barrow. A shield lies up against the dirt-wall, teardrop-shaped and wood warped, with brightly-coloured inlays in the shape of a crown; there is, mercifully, an axe, ceremonial in design but sharp-bladed, gilded so that it looks like the blade is golden. Its handle is strangely long, not like men's weapons usually are but longer, but an axe is an axe and he can see how with the broad shield would work well with it.

 

He slides himself into thoughts of chain maille integrity and the reach of pole-arms to forget how the ring is still upon his finger, and he has not been able to bring himself to take it off. The maille does not fit quite right, and he has no undershirt to warm himself against the cold metal, and he is no longer in his bright Durin blues, and so long as he amuses himself with these minor discontents he can ignore how the opal shines even in the dark.

 

"He wandered, lost, upon the dark moors," says Bombadil from the doorway. He watched Gimli with an accusatory eye, and the pit of guilt and dread inside his stomach doubles in depth. Bombadil has found his horse, who is—traitor!—happily chewing on a nosebag, a shovel tied to his saddle. "You must take better care."

 

"I will," Gimli says with a bow of thanks, for, wonder of wonders, the strange man in the pointed wizard's hat and the yellow wool cardigan has found in the hills his blue mantle as well as his horse and a shovel. "My thanks, Mister Bombadil."

 

"You must take your prize and go," Bombadil says shortly. There is something sinister about the certainty with which he says it. "I do not want it here."

 

"I shall not take it," Gimli says, for as he takes the shovel he knows suddenly that he cannot. The promises it had made—of a life without mourning, without hurts—they are not substantial enough to be called promises. His heart is empty, then, but still he sets his shoulder to the stone upon which the Queen lies dead and shifts it over the ground.

 

The muscles in his legs scream with the effort, but it goes, and the earth beneath it is dark and dry, no grass or fungi. The shovel does not break it easily, but it breaks. He digs, and though the rings sings to him that it can shift dirt just easily as stone he keeps digging until the pit is as deep as a Dwarf stands and the pale morning light is filtering slowly into the cavern and making the cobwebs glow. The Queen stares serenely towards the stars, past the earth above her.

 

He takes off the ring—his whole body cries out at it. He fears he might go mad, might dissolve then into light and dust or shrivel into a skeleton of a person like the Queen beside him, might take to riding a black horse and wielding a Morgul blade—but he takes it off. It falls into the black earth, and he covers it over, packs it tight until the ground is flat again.

 

Bombadil watches. He casts no shadow, though the sunlight now streams past him like a boulder in a fast-flowing stream.

 

The stone moves back easily. Gimli takes one long, shaking breath, and it feels as thought he has not breathed since he heard Legolas calling for him.

 

"Thank you," he says. "For the shovel."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> all of this is, i think, _mostly_ possible? this is tolkien fic, so it was inevitable that at least one plot point was going to occur in verse. but. yeah. i didn't even try to write a bombadil-song.


	16. shelter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in which the author earns the ship tag

The thought of Tom Bombadil is not easily corralled. It dances over his land, and cannot decide what it wishes to think of, and always it sings of his pretty lady, but for once as the spring rises about him he is able to stand still and think of one thing.

 

He thinks of Gimli, son of Gloin, Lord of Aglarond, Lockbearer, Elf-friend, Dwarf of Many Journeys.

 

Tom knows the names that a person carries just as well as the names they give him, and this one has many. It had not boded well; he knows much of the magic under the barrows, and knows how they twine themselves tighter about someone who thinks that they are great. He had not hoped that he would give it up of his own volition, and the ancient laws prevent him from interfering, so he had merely hoped to send him on his way and ensure he took the ring with him—but behind him, in the deeps of the Downs, a magic flickers and reaches hungrily and begins to die.

 

Interesting, he thinks. Most strange and new.

 

The Dwarf rides fast to the borders of Tom's dominion, clad in the finery of the dead. Tom bounds over his hills and forests, and finds in a low ditch that which the horse had thrown off in her fear. He cannot interfere, but he has been granted leave to help travellers in his lands, and so help he shall, and hope that Gimli son of Gloin does not die as he ventures away over the earth for purposes unknown. He is too interesting.

 

The pack, with its small comforts and fur cloak and rations, he leaves on the Greenway to be found, and goes away to find his Lady and tell her of what he has seen during the night. She loves a strange story, and will tell it to the foxes and the birds.

 

//

 

"Good morning," Bilbo Baggins chirps up at him from his throne, sprawled across a bench with the self-satisfied indolence that Hobbits seem to be so good at. Gandalf opens his mouth to refute that it is, indeed, a good morning, and to question the underlying assumptions, but Mister Baggins continues, most rudely: "Are you here about the dragon?"

 

Gandalf blinks. "Perhaps I am," he rallies, but he has lost the upper hand and he knows it.

 

//

 

"I have to—Please excuse me, my lady, for I must go."

 

He steps away from the mirror. He cannot look at it any longer, and still feels as though he is falling into some deep pit into the earth.

 

Galadriel watches him, as though he is a puzzle and she has figured out the trick. She does this often, he has learned, and often it is because it is true. "The mirror shows many things," she says, slow, measured, though he is busying himself with trying to find his things and his hands shake like willow-leaves. She catches his arm when he turns to the trunk to climb down and take off running; her grip is like steel.

 

"Many things," she repeats, "Some that have happened, and some that are happening, and some that may never yet come to pass. Which of them did you see?"

 

Legolas pauses, and tries to muster himself, draw the disparate parts of his mind back to where they belong. "I," he swallows. "I thought it was now. It felt like now."

 

"Where was the now that you saw?"

 

He does not know. Gimli lies somewhere in darkness, or he may, and he does not know where. Oh, he can guess—not in the Rhovanion, that is certain, and he is likely to be near Ered Luin—but he could not find him now. Like Smeagol and his ring, underneath Goblin-Town, he knows there is a danger and he knows its type and what is at stake, but he is one elf and the world is vast.

 

The Lady reads this in his face, for it is writ plain. "Often, it shows what we fear most," she says. "The mist—" and now her smooth brow furrows with concern, "I have not seen the like of the rising fog before. But you have a clear talent for foresight. It may have opened easily to you, and nothing more."

 

"Foresight?"

 

"Like Men may see the future in clouds and the paths of streams, and your Hobbits I am told can tell of coming danger by a foreboding, and a Dwarf may dream of the future where we would dream the past, so an Elf may see through their own eyes at different times, in the mirror or in the stars or unaided. You are young, Legolas, and unknown to the world; such a power may have come to you, and you saw the thread of time so clear that you may have lived it. Or I may be wrong, and some other forces that I do not understand are at work." Were she not too dignified for it, she would have shrugged. "So it is, I think, with what you have just seen. It may have been many things, or it may have been nothing, or it may have been something we have yet to comprehend."

 

Legolas sighs, and breathes out slowly. The vastness and the difficulty of his task becomes visible to him. He is not young, not as she thinks, and it certainly does not feel like a prophecy to him, the years that he has lived.

 

"You may be right," he says. "What I fear most . . . I do not know what I fear most."

 

But perhaps he does know. Perhaps he is lying to herself, and knows it, and he has known since he first saw Lothlorien, bare in the winter. Or perhaps he does not. "It may have . . . Yes. Perhaps I saw that."

 

There is no defence he can make to himself, now, not when there is an empty grief inside his sternum as though his chest is packed with healer's gauze in the place where his heart was once. He shivers, and turns his thought upon himself, and knows that now when he is faced with a crossroads and one fork leads away to victory in the War of the Ring before any more can suffer and die and another leads towards a Dwarf who may or may not be the Gimli he had loved, he would ride away from victory and not look back. He aches with the truth of it, but he faces it.

 

"I thank you," he says to the Lady, and he means it in many ways; she smiles, once, and it is like the sun rising.

 

"We will aid you, Legolas of the Mirkwood, in the task you have given yourself. You may rely on Caras Galadhorn. I hope it brings you a little peace of mind."

 

"Oh, even a little peace of mind is welcome," he jokes, "I find I have so little." The levity is a struggle, but he does not lie. The offer of aid is both welcome and, he thinks, will be sorely needed. So many things are yet uncertain.

 

"Please forgive me," he says with a bow. "You have been exceeding gracious, but it is late at night. And I have many things to think upon."

 

"Go freely in the forest, for you are welcome as a guest."

 

He smiles as much as he is able, and does.

 

//

 

He goes to the target-range, because he has never done well with silence. His thoughts are too loud in his head.

 

The bow had shattered—he had not marked it when it happened, because he is now used to his longbow and had operated against his knowledge on the assumption that there were always new bows in the armoury at Ithilien. But now he stands on the white sand with the targets down the lane in the pale morning light and there is no bow in his hand.

 

There is a possibility that all that he is, all that has made him the person that he thinks he is, is one long look into the mirror. He cannot know. He feels a little as if he is floating—magic was not made for him, he understands it not at all, but he knows that the Lady knows of what she speaks. If she says the War was a dream, then a dream it may have been, in the ways of men. A vision.

 

The war, the ring, the Galadhrim longbow that had once sung under his hands, all of Ithilien in its late days, the shine of Aglarond. Gimli.

 

He can admit it to himself, now, can't he? A cold wind blows from the mountains, and the evening fades, and he was here before. And he loved Gimli, then. He had walked under the mallorn-trees and came to know him, and he had not allowed himself to say that he loved him, for he feared that they might all die on Morgul blades. And they had won the war, and he had not said it, then, for he was keeping it secret, inside his chest where the love would never tarnish or grow pale with grief.

 

His father went West, their twin kingdoms had grown together like two trees about one pillar, and he had not said a word to himself.

 

The grief came, eventually, for it cannot be stopped and it cannot be slowed, and he did not allow himself to know the truth of it for fear that it would overwhelm him.

 

But it may have been as thin and false as his reflection in the water, only there to him. He may have loved a dream.

 

Yes. Yes, it is possible. Those later days, as they had built a boat, they were too kind to be real, too soft and warm inside his memory. He cannot trust the image, cannot trust the pictures that play inside his head, Gimli and the glasses he had taken to wearing and his silver-red beard and his broad smile and the way that they had relied upon each other, for he knows that the mind may make itself a perfect place and lock itself there to starve.

 

He cannot trust himself.

 

He has no bow.

 

He opens a hand; it is his hand, sure as the stars, sure, as Gimli would say, as stone. There is the long scar up the pad of his thumb, the callus on his index finger, the long fingers and strong wrist. Gimli, he thinks, had hair-thin scars across the pads of his fingers from the wires and narrow engravers' tools that had made his craft. When he was younger, they had not been so visible, but in the last days they were a texture that was not mistakable.

 

And then he thinks: did you invent this? Did you read some book of gem-craft and think of scars and forget that you had thought it? Is there some young dwarf in training in Ered Luin who knows not that you paint such things onto the person he will become?

 

Does he come, now, to know the truth of himself only to know that he is in love with a ghost, a sweet and insubstantial person of mist?

 

The sun is high in the sky, now, coming down through the slim trees in knife-thin slices. There are Galadhrim among them, and they laugh and make merry and take sight down the lanes. Now is not the time for hard work, they sing to each other. Now is the time for laughter and bright songs, for it is the springtime, and there is no war and nothing to be feared.

 

He is a stranger, here.

 

He puts his hand down, and wonders if he can just leave as he is. Would they let him ride away down the river, and not question why he does not dance with them? Arwen drifts through the forest on the edges of his vision—he knows her by the sound of her laugh, and when he turns to watch her she looks . . . Young. Alive, still, in a way that does not seem real, because when she smiles at a handmaiden she looks half-dead. He wonders if he looks quite so cold.

 

There is a flet at the edges of his vision that overhangs the river; he would not notice it at all, except that all at once he can remember creeping back to that flet in the early hours of the morning some time in August. It must have been almost a century now, since then, since he sat with his legs overhanging the branches and watched those few Galadhrim that still remained hold some dance. There had been mulled wine, he remembers, and the memory is vivid; he can smell it, could hold a cup in his hand and let it warm him if he chose. The air was heavy with the smell of cut grass, the river wide and low, the setting sun sparkling in the eddies of its surface.

 

He heard the gulls in the back of his mind all that night, and had not been able to bear looking at Gimli for the knowledge that some day soon he would not be able to, and gone alone into the forest, but still he had found himself drawn back to their flet as the evening drew close. He had not looked behind him, but had only sat over the river, and found himself shivering.

 

"Cold?" Gimli had said, and the stiffness of his pride in had weakened with concern.

 

"Not at all."

 

"But you shiver."

 

"Oh, perhaps, perhaps."

 

"And you are not cold?"

 

He could hear in his voice the exasperation, the almost vicious sarcasm, and knew that his attempt to detach himself was working. And then the whole flet had rocked as Gimli hauled himself from the blankets in which he had made a nest.

 

"I have no idea what is wrong with you," Gimli said shortly, hauling his raft of fabric behind him as he sat beside Legolas. "You will not tell me. That's all right. You needn't tell me anything you don't want to. But I have eyes. They may not see far, and they may do poorly outside of caves, but they saw that you shivered. And I have blankets, because I am cold too. So you may share the blankets, if you like. Or you may ignore me."

 

Legolas' eyes had stung, and he had not known why, but he remembers still the foreign pain of it.

 

"I don't want to share the blankets."

 

"Well, then." He had hoped that Gimli would just leave—it would ache but it would be easy—but when he stood from the blankets it was not to find a more hospitable place to sleep. Instead, with a face like a blank wall of rock, he had stripped away his heavy gambeson and held it out to Legolas.

 

It ought to have been a gesture of kindness and not much more, but in his memory, among the golden autumn leaves over the river, it turned into symbolism and verses. Dwarves do not often go without their armour, he knows this all to0 well, and even to sleep Gimli did not lay aside the padding he wore underneath his ring-mail, but he had taken it off because Legolas shivered.

 

Legolas had looked at him, his shoulders pale where the sun did not touch them, standing in his tunic as the wind had blown from the North, and he had not been cold at all had taken the gambeson regardless. The fabric was heavy, as it ought to have been, faded blue from its former ceremonial glory; it was too broad for him, torn at the elbows where his bracers pinched with the down poking through the holes, and yet he had wanted to sink into it forever.

 

Gimi had nodded with the ghost of a smile as the tension drained out of him, and wrapped himself back in his blankets. They had sat together, not speaking, as the river sung below their feet and the forest breathed; Legolas felt the sea inside his heart like a magnet, but did not follow it. He leaned against Gimli, and slid his hands into the pockets of the coat, and laid his head against his shoulder as though all was fine.

 

Perhaps it is.

 

But he is still standing on the sand of the archery range in the middle of the day in the hot sun; there is no dwarf sleeping on the flet over the water, just an image in his head.

 

Is his imagination so vivid as that? Is he such an artist that he could make that battered Dwarven gambeson, with its frayed golden embroidery at the cuffs and the grass-stains on the back?

 

He does not think he has the skill to have invented Gimli. He thinks that no-one on Middle Earth does, and Aule would be hard-pressed to try it.

 

The cobwebs are shaken from his brain as he walks to the river-side and splashes at his face with water. The fog of reminiscence fades as much as he is able to induce it to. He requisitions a longbow from an obliging guard, and attempts to drive the wistfulness away.

 

The muscles across his shoulders burn, and as he learns the flexibility of these arrows and the bend of the borrowed bow he batters a mark into the target, and still he does not know what he is to do, or whether he is the magnet or the compass or just a needle with no iron, spinning on a dial.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oh, boy. this chapter did Not want to be written. but hey. it is.
> 
> i am bad at writing introspection, i think.


End file.
